


neither sword nor crown

by arahir



Category: Vinland Saga (Anime), Vinland Saga (Manga)
Genre: "only i can kill him", Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M, erotic sparring but when is it not erotic, hurt/comfort is over now we have injury/panic, ok thorfinn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-11
Updated: 2020-02-17
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:15:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 30,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21874267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arahir/pseuds/arahir
Summary: Canute does whatever he can to keep Thorfinn, though it might cost him everything.“You want to kill me now.”The words steal his breath with their truth. Thorfinn looks at him, from under his filthy bangs, eyes piercing and bruised. Something in Canute’s chest flips over at that look, at how wounded he is. He’s broken. He’s been broken from the first moment they met, but now he’s lost even Askeladd to hold his pieces together.“But if you fight me like this, it’s not fair. You have to wait until I get stronger. Be my guard until then, and I’ll duel you, warrior to warrior.”Thorfinn’s gaze is unflinching. Canute reaches behind him and pulls the dagger from the folds of his fur-lined cloak. The blade is a part of Thorfinn, like the crown is a part of Canute, now. He hands it over, hilt first.“Or, you can kill me today. Right now, right here.”
Relationships: Canute/Thorfinn (Vinland Saga)
Comments: 146
Kudos: 406





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Now translated to Chinese, which you can find [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26317573)!
> 
> **If you haven't read or watched Vinland Saga...**
> 
> ([Watch this clip. It'll tell you everything.](https://youtu.be/bF4YV807Oec?t=305))
> 
> Canute is the young prince who has just taken the throne. Askeladd is the mercenary who worked for Canute and who killed Canute's father so Canute could become King. Thorfinn is Canute's grudging bodyguard. He's been following Askeladd around since he was a child, waiting to get revenge on Askeladd for killing his father. 
> 
> After Canute kills Askeladd, Thorfinn, in despair and grief, tries to kill Canute in front of the entire court. That's where this story begins.
> 
> **If you _have_ read Vinland Saga...**
> 
> just a post prologue fix it, lads.

"I won’t ask you to forgive me,” Canute tells him. “You need not serve under me any longer. You can go wherever you wish," Canute tells him, feigning all the dignity of the crown that he can muster.

But he's already failed. His first words as king, and they’re the wrong ones entirely. He meant them to be a balm; he’s taken everything from Thorfinn, but this one thing he might give back. Freedom is not nothing. Even as the words leave his mouth, he feels a tug behind his ribs follow them, as if he might pull them back. Another loss in exchange for his crown, he realizes.

With Askeladd’s blood on both their hands, Thorfinn turns to him in the half-light of the ruined feast hall, eyes open and clear with some emotion Canute can’t identify beyond horror. Later, he’ll be able to recall every heartbeat of it—the head of shaggy blond hair turning at his words, the slow reveal of a face frozen, eyes shock-wide, hard mouth open and silent.

Thorfinn shows so little. The betrayal is almost a surprise. Canute hadn’t realized there was enough trust between them for the loss to be so dire.

Canute barely has time to register this before Thorfinn moves. The blade flashes through the air, arcing toward Canute. He sees it in the same instant Thorkell shoves him aside, and then the metal tears through his cheek, glancing off bone. Thorfinn’s speed is legendary; Canute admired him for it, for so much. It was meant to be a mortal blow and he realizes even as he lies on the ground that even if he had seen it coming, even if he’d had a prayer of dodging it, he wouldn’t have been able to with Thorfinn’s expression still dancing in front of his eyes like a memory of the sun after walking into a dark room, trailing across his vision like a ghost.

The next moment is chaos.

His men pin Thorfinn to the floor. He struggles and screams, grasps at the ground like he would crawl to Canute and tear him apart from the bottom up, and Canute has only the sense left to tell them that Thorfinn is not to be harmed. The order comes too loud, too fast, so he tries to meter himself as he stands and picks up the crown. It’s all too fast. 

Askeladd’s blood, his father’s head on the floor, Thorfinn’s dagger falling from his fingers as he’s dragged from the room, still screaming. Canute doesn’t realize he’s covered in his own blood, too, until after the speeches are done and the dead are being moved, leaving streaks of red across the once-fine floor of the hall.

And even then, when he closes his eyes, it’s not the dead he sees but the look on Thorfinn’s face. 

“What will I do with him?” Canute asks no one, but Thorkell is still over his shoulder. 

“He’ll be beat,” Thorkell assures him, “and then you can have him killed. Or sell him. Shame.” 

Canute raises a hand to pull the thick cloth of his robe tight across his chest against the sudden chill. Beaten. Killed. Or a slave. Askeladd, dead at his hand, dead at his feet. None of this is as planned. He nods, tightly, not trusting himself to speak. 

An attendant at his elbow murmurs, “Your Highness, we should get that seen to,” motioning to the open wound across his face. The pain is starting to come back, but it feels far away, as if it belongs to someone else.

The trail of blood down his neck almost tickles. “No,” he says, drawing his fingertips across the edge of bare flesh. “I earned this.” 

A flash of light from the floor catches his vision. The dagger, tip coated in his own blood.

He picks it up later, when no one is watching—though everyone is watching now, all the time, and always will be. He hides his prize in his cloak, holding it with one hand so tight that the bindings on the hilt leave marks in his soft hands.

If he had even a finger’s worth of Thorfinn’s determination, he might make a king worth having.

A day passes before he lets himself see Thorfinn. He goes at night, with a candle to light his path and no guard, picking his way to the beast cage they threw him in. Thorkell had mentioned it offhand. He sets his bowl of stew by the cage door and surveys the pile of rags that is Thorfinn through the bars.

He looks bad, but then, he’s never looked happy, healthy, or clean. “Thorfinn,” Canute says softly. 

The pile stirs. Canute stifles a gasp when the blond head rises from the mud. His face is so blackened and bloody, his features are hard to make out in the flickering light of the candle. His eyes at least are clear, a gleam against the dark. 

“I—I brought you food.” 

Thorfinn’s only acknowledgment is to put his head back down on the muddy floor. Canute hates himself for stuttering, and for not knowing the right words, and for doing this at all. 

“It was Askeladd’s choice. I didn’t want him to do it.” 

Canute presses closer to the bars. “He made me. You have to believe me.” 

This is the only man on earth Canute would beg for anything, but the words fall on deaf ears. Before he can decide against it, Canute pulls the key from his pocket and slips it into the rusted lock. It sticks but gives after a moment’s forcing with a whine. Now, Thorfinn rises, or tries. 

Canute makes no move. Simply lets the door open and pushes the bowl of stew inside. “Here,” he says. 

A king isn’t allowed to cook. That time is behind him, but the memory of Thorfinn’s face at his first bite of hot food in the cabin they’d shared for a time is one of the few he treasures. He stole a bowl from the kitchen and ignored the looks it got him. In sum, the night is a series of bad decisions, one after the other in perfect succession. This is only one more, he realizes, as the look in Thorfinn’s hollowed eyes fills with malice. 

Even beaten, he moves fast. Canute might have remembered that.

His head explodes with stars as Thorfinn pins him against the bars of the cage, hand around his neck. It’s not a fight he can win, so he doesn’t try. Instead he goes limp in the hold and focuses on how weak the grip is. Still tight enough to make breathing a struggle. “Stop,” he tries to say, but the hold tightens. “This isn’t… how a warrior kills… _Thorfinn—_ ” The words barely make it past his lips, caught up in the grip at his throat. 

At the word warrior, Thorfinn releases him. He’s still crouched over Canute, and this close he really is a wreck, the scent of his unwashed body and the dried blood crusting his face and hair and clothes almost eye-watering. 

“It’s my fault you’re like this,” Canute whispers. “It was Askeladd’s fault, and now it’s mine. You’re my responsibility.” 

Thorfinn is so still. Only his labored breath belies any life in his body, rattling into the space between them. His eyes move to Canute’s cheek, to the wound that’s been cleaned but not sewn, and he releases Canute at last with a disgusted sound. 

The bowl of stew is overturned in the mud. Thorfinn stumbles over it as he settles back in his corner, curling on his side once more like a wounded animal. This is the last chance Canute will have to save some shred of this, he realizes. In the morning, they’ll want to be rid of him one way or the other. Sold as a slave over the sea, Thorkell said. That would be the safest option. 

Canute cannot imagine losing one more thing. Love is the province of the uncaring. This is prejudice—that’s what the old priest told him. This feeling is nothing more than selfish want, but he has no reason not to keep it. No reason not to try, at least. 

And, some part of him realizes, no one will be able to get under his skin the way Thorfinn will, the way he has from the start. The crown is already a painful weight, changing him moment by moment. Thorfinn is perhaps the last creature on earth that doesn’t care about it. 

Whether he cares about anything is another question. Canute is too scared of the answer, though one comes to him in that moment, like revelation.

“I’ll make a deal with you,” he offers. “You want to kill me now.” The words steal his breath with their truth. Thorfinn looks at him, from under his filthy bangs, eyes piercing and bruised. Something in Canute’s chest flips over at that look, at how wounded he is. He’s broken. He’s been broken from the first moment they met, but now he’s lost even Askeladd to hold his pieces together. “If you fight me like this, it’s not fair. You have to wait until I get stronger. Be my guard until then, and I’ll duel you, warrior to warrior.” 

Thorfinn’s gaze is unflinching. 

“Or, you can kill me today. Right now, right here.” 

Canute reaches behind him and pulls the dagger from the folds of his fur-lined cloak. The blade is a part of Thorfinn, like the crown is a part of Canute, now. He hands it over, hilt first. 

Thorfinn makes no move to take it. 

Hate. That’s the emotion playing behind his eyes. Canute adds it to the list of faces Thorfinn has shown him in their time together, once countable on a single hand. Disdain, smugness, anger, determination, betrayal, and hate. A perfect set, he thinks bitterly. The part of him that had hid his face in Ragnar’s back at the first whisper of discomfort when he met Thorfinn balks now. He tries to quash it, but then Thorfinn’s fingers close over the dagger hilt and it takes every remaining ounce of his nerve to keep his eyes open and focused.

“Fine.”

That’s the only word he speaks, the only sound he makes. 

Canute can't remember how to breathe. "You agree?"

Thorfinn says nothing, but it's victory enough. It may well prove to be the worst decision of his brief time as King, but it's also one he cannot bear to question or regret. Anyway, it won't be the worst of the night. He rises from the mud and motions to the open door, gathering the candle holder from the ground and leading the way back into the building where his quarters are housed. He ignores the lame shuffle of Thorfinn's steps and the looks of the bored guards at the door.

What he is not prepared for is Thorkell just inside the door. He surveys the two of them with his discordant smile, almost looking like a threat. "Thorfinn," he says, a question in the word.

"He was not in his right mind, before. He has agreed to be indentured as my personal guard again.” Canute’s voice shakes a little, but Thorkell doesn’t notice; he only has eyes for Thorfinn as he sighs and scratches his neck.

"You will protect him. Or I really will have to kill you, nephew."

Thorfinn snorts, though the sound is too wet, too animal, almost a snarl. "As if you could," he says without the usual bite; a simple fact which chills Canute even under his cloak. 

Thorkell laughs. "Maybe,” he says, and motions them through the door. “At least try not to get mud on everything."

As if he has ever cared. Canute can't help but think he means the king is part of that everything and it’s already too late on that count. His clothes are a mess and there’s a muddy handprint drying against his neck. "Send for hot water and cloth," Canute orders him, trying to muster a little more dignity with the act. "Have it brought to my quarters."

At least he has the capacity to surprise. Thorkell blinks at him looking like nothing so much as some massive, confused owl. "I’m not your servant, and you can't bring that thing in there with you—"

"Thorkell." 

The dismissal is sharp. He doesn't even need to look to get his point across, and he isn't questioned again. The man lets them go with nothing more than another sigh, though the weight of his gaze is as heavy as the hand he laid against Canute’s back to hold him up when the sight of Askeladd dead at his feet, by his hand, was too much for his knees to bear. 

That was hours ago, he realizes. Just hours. The cut across his face aches anew. 

Once inside his chambers, he closes the door and allows himself a sigh. Thorfinn stays beside the entrance, as if he's trying to make himself a statue. He was never animated outside of a fight, but this is something different. _I really have broken him_ , Canute thinks. In his mind, he imagines approaching, looking down into clear eyes, and finding some understanding. A fool's dream.

A knock startles them both. 

He pushes Thorfinn behind the door as he accepts the bowl of water and pile of fine-spun cloth. He should have specified what it would be used for, he realizes, as he closes the door behind the serving woman and turns to Thorfinn. "Strip," he orders.

Thorfinn doesn't move.

"Are you going to be this stubborn the whole time?" Even as he asks, he knows the answer is an obvious yes. There is no world in which Thorfinn would not be pig headed to the point of absurdity. Before the entrance to paradise, Thorfinn would refuse gatekeeper basic courtesy. Maybe that's why Canute admires him so.

But, to his surprise, Thorfinn begins peeling off his layers, the task labored and slow. Maybe he’s simply too tired to fight it. Underneath his soiled clothes, he’s a mess. Canute wonders what he expected—the boy is all bruise. His arm is the worst. The color says it was broken and broken again and is healing poorly. Askeladd had to break it for him a week back, reset it in a way that would be usable, but it’s been ruined again by their fight, no doubt. Ruined again by fighting through the crowd at the door of the hall that afternoon, and once more by whatever beating the men meted out. Canute almost drops the wet cloth in his hand, feeling suddenly like he's tried stepping in a puddle and found himself neck deep in the ocean instead. 

Thorfinn is not beautiful, but as Canute finds the courage to approach him and start teasing blood and grime off his pale skin, he can't fight his rising embarrassment. When he gets to Thorfinn's face, the embarrassment shifts to something more curious, less vain. Canute draws the cloth over his chin and cheeks, and then his full mouth. This takes the longest. His nose has been broken again; there's little of his features that isn't bloody, and his hair is almost matted with filth. Thorfinn shows no expression, but he flinches now and then, a reflex less at pain and more at being touched, Canute realizes. 

When finished, he looks down and finds himself staring at a young man his age, plain featured, but with the promise of a strong jaw, high cheekbones, and what might have once been big, kind eyes. His baby fat persists around his cheeks, though how he has any left after years of hard winters with Askeladd’s band, living on nothing better than scraps is a mystery. The rest of him is scrawny—muscle over bone. Canute can't bear to look another moment. 

"Here," he says, handing over the sleeping shirt the servants thought to spread out for him on the bed. 

Thorfinn stares at it like he's been handed a live snake. He lets it drop to the floor and then begins pulling back on his filthy clothes instead. He doesn't ask to leave, at least. Canute readies himself for bed with the burn of eyes on his shoulder and reminds himself he asked for this. It's good practice for a king not to mind a stare. When done, they settle into their awkward station: Canute in bed, too restless to sleep, and Thorfinn on the floor with his back to the door.

When Thorfinn speaks, his voice is nothing more than a shred of sound. “We’re not warriors.” 

Canute takes a breath.

“You said you would fight me warrior to warrior. We’re not warriors.” 

This is how he ends his first full day as a king: in a room with a man who wants to kill him. In a room, with the last person on earth he might, in his flawed way, truly love.

Not all are so sanguine about his decision as Thorkell. He wishes at once that Askeladd were still alive to whisper in the right ears that the king was wise to turn an enemy back to his side, but in truth the thought of Askeladd's wisdom is too limned in pain to be a help. Gunnar wrings his hands, and eyes Thorfinn as if he’s a beast ready to spring. The look is reflected on the faces of his guards, but it’s Floki that’s most vocal. It's not the commander’s first challenge and it won't be the last. Canute sees years of this ahead of him, full of useless advice and cajoling, until Floki has outlasted his usefulness or decides to serve him in truth.

"He's no more than a mad dog,” Floki is saying, hushed, as if Thorfinn will not be able to hear their conversation a scant few steps away. Of course, he can. Of course, he doesn’t care. “I can't sit by while Your Highness is in danger. If you desire a personal guard, let me choose from my men—"

No one knows about his deal with Thorfinn, but somehow he thinks he’ll be safer with the beast he knows than one that answers to Floki’s call.

"Enough. This has been discussed. Do you not trust the crown's judgment?" 

The crown, not the King. It’s a slip of the tongue. People look at it before they look at him now—but when they look at him after, it’s with veneration.

Floki backs down. He bows, but his eyes are on Thorfinn, who has borne all this conversation in sneering silence. At least one of them is allowed the expression of open distaste. In truth, the questions are worth asking. In the light of day, Canute cannot believe what he's done, what he's bound Thorfinn to. Food and a bath and a new wrap on his arm aren’t enough to cover up any of his wildness. It's difficult to look at him, at this broken, mad thing Canute has chained to a distant hope of revenge. 

But, like all young men, knowing he might have been wrong does not make him more inclined to admit it. Quite the opposite. He can hear Askeladd laughing at him from beyond the grave.

The English forces defect as he feared and hoped. It gives him a fight, but a fight is what he needs now. Something for Thorkell and the Danes to chew on while he reasserts authority. Canute goes with him, and Thorfinn, too. He makes a pet project of getting Thorfinn to eat actual meals and wear clothes that have been sewn or washed in the last year. His hair is hopeless, but the rest is workable, especially once Thorfinn realizes that Canute will take time out of his evening to wipe the dirt from his face if Thorfinn doesn’t do it himself. 

Within a month, he’s looking nearly human nearly all of the time. One by one, the defectors come crawling back, and Canute knows the picture he makes with Thorkell at one side and Floki on the other and Thorfinn a specter of rage at his front—not as well-known as the others, but still Karlsefni. Still resplendent in ferocity.

The setting comes off his arm and his bruises heal. That’s all that does. In a month, Canute wrings a handful of words from him and counts it a blessing. Better than waking up with a dagger at his throat. Or worse: to Thorfinn gone. 

The smartest of the lords return to his side early and stay close, and Canute thinks it only prudent to start feeding bits of his food to the dogs before each meal time. But when the first attempt on his life comes, it’s nothing so cunning. 

In a small village at the edge of the Danelaw, he dismounts after a long day’s ride. The men of his guard are headed for the feast that the locals will have prepared, and Thorkell with them. Thorfinn is already off and gone around some corner. Enough men are still milling about that Canute doesn’t catch the man running at him until it’s too late to dodge at all, and he’d thought he was better at this by now, thought his training with Thorkell and the caution of the crown would have taught him anything—

The weight of the man hits him at full force. Big, dark hair, simple leather armor, and then he’s down and trapped under the weight of the stranger, waiting for the pain to hit, because there must have been a blade in his hand and Canute’s chainmail can’t stand up to a direct hit like that. 

His men yell around him; a woman screams. The weight lifts off.

Canute blinks up at Thorfinn, who is staring down at him, dagger in hand. The stranger is a heap beside him, blood pooling around his corpse. It’s not the man that hit him; it was Thorfinn, he realizes. 

“Dodge next time, idiot,” Thorfinn says and turns away.

Canute nods. The men are piling back into the square, Thorkell at the head of them, axe in hand and looking for a fight. As soon as he sees Canute unblooded, he shrugs. Floki at least has the grace to look concerned rather than disappointed.

The crown lies behind Canute in the dirt. He picks it up, dusts it off, replaces it on his head. “I’ll bleed again one day,” he says, to one in particular, thumbing the healed cut across his cheek. As long as the crown demands more, he will have no choice but to give it. A fair exchange. But as he watches Thorfinn stalk away, the men giving him a wide berth and staring as he goes, the irony of it pervades that moment. 

The crown could give him anything, but not that. Not the fear, not the respect. 

And never Thorfinn.

No one argues with him about Thorfinn’s place at his side after that day. But they still argue. Aethelred will return and fight for his throne, and a preemptive attack would be best, they say, and why not beg his brother Harald, King of Denmark for aid? Why not subjugate Wales while the timing allows for it. Before winter, it would be wise, Your Highness, to do this, and better to do that. A thousand whispers in his ear day in and day out, because his ear is the one that sits under the crown.

The best part of his day is the quiet of his rooms or tent with no one to bother him and only Thorfinn’s silent, dogged presence as a balm. 

The worst of it all comes from the men. Thorkell’s Jomsvikings overhear Thorfinn’s derisive, _Sure, princess,_ on the afternoon of a tepid march and it catches like fire. 

Princess this, princess that. Not even queen, now, for all that there's a crown on his head and a throne beneath him, an army at his back. The worst part is that it's affectionate. He overhears it coming down the hall, two guards discussing his method of rule, though it’s less discussing and more guffawing over their plans to drink themselves dead that night and give a toast to the princess for making it happen.

Princess. 

If he ordered the men to stop, it would only ensure it as his permanent title behind closed doors and in cups, with none of the affection it holds now. No. If he wants respect, he'll have to look the part. He gave up his ambitions for a beard when the pathetic bit of stubble he’d dedicated himself to growing out netted nothing but a stuttering question from Gunnar if he needed help shaving.

But he can at least cut the hair. 

Of course, none of it will matter to Thorfinn. At least there's one man who's consistent—he wouldn't respect Canute if he had ten inches of beard and a face full of wrinkles both. 

“What are you doing?” 

The quiet words from behind him are more than Thorfinn has bothered to offer him in days. Canute tries not to show his surprise, seated on a low chair in his—their—tent, knife in hand. “Cutting my hair.” 

“You—why?” It sounds less a question and more an admonishment. A stupid noble doing stupid things. This is all he will ever be in Thorfinn’s eyes. 

Thorfinn has no respect for him left to lose, so Canute replies with truth. “It makes me look weak. Like a woman. A _princess_ , I think, was the word you used.” And everyone uses now.

Moments pass as he rebraids his hair to give himself something to hack through. He knows he was a fool for hoping for a conversation, but then Thorfinn speaks again. "That's not what made you weak."

Made, not makes. The distinction is perilous and precious. Canute's hands still. “Then what?" He studies himself in the small hammered-metal mirror: fine features, pale skin, raw scar only now scarring over to bright pink. His hair is shorn around the mark. "You already took care of most of it anyway," he mutters, raising the knife back to the rope of braided hair he’s gathered.

A hand closes over his. 

Canute freezes, breath caught in his throat. A hand, a knife, his throat right there. Their deal still stands, but what meaning does a thing like that have for Thorfinn? He doesn't even know why he wanted Askeladd's head. Foolish to think he could control a thing like this.

But then a new sensation. A hand on his hair, drawing the braid back over his shoulder. Breath on the crown of his head. 

He's going light headed from lack of air. Thorfinn's own breaths are almost too loud in the quiet, this close. He remembers when he first realized other creatures had breath—how precious that seemed. The body behind him is alive. For all that Thorfinn goes through daily life like a ghost walking, he is alive, and his hand over Canute's is full of warmth. This is the first time he's asked for anything in weeks, but Canute has no idea what it is Thorfinn wants, or how to give it.

One breath, he makes himself take, short and thin, and wills himself to relax. What feels like a minute but can only be a few beats of his heart pass in silence. At last, Thorfinn releases him and steps away. He hears the door open and close again with nothing more than a whisper. 

Canute takes a surging breath and turns back to the table and mirror, throwing the knife on it. His reflection is red-faced, beyond flustered. It's been months since he looked like this—not a king, not a prince, barely more than a boy.

But he doesn't cut his hair.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [[fic on twitter](https://twitter.com/arahir/status/1215790002048626688)]
> 
> I don't expect anyone to read this. I had to do it for me and for the three months I've spent listening to nothing but [the Vinland Saga opening](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEVcTStgA4A) on repeat. It's gotten me through some hard times.
> 
> But if you do read it, I thank you and I hope when it's done it's added something to your life. Next chapter will be up Tuesday evening and the final chapter Thursday. You can find me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/arahir?s=09) and [tumblr](http://arahir.tumblr.com) where I am trying and failing to talk less.


	2. Chapter 2

"He's not right in the head," a guard murmurs.

They're watching Thorfinn spar. Canute is, at least, because Thorkell had sparred with him until Canute's hands bled and now his only entertainment is studying the speed of Thorfinn’s movements, the ruthlessness of Thorfinn’s approach from under a tree across the field. Askeladd said his fighting had no strategy to it. Now, Canute knows enough to see the truth in that. Thorfinn wins on the utter brutality and speed of a cornered animal. It is almost as nauseating to watch as it is beautiful. 

Kings do not sigh, but if they did, he might. The guard is right, but he shouldn’t say it where anyone can hear. What’s broken in Thorfinn now can't be mended, but it was Canute that did the breaking. 

Thorkell sighs for him. "His father was a great man." 

The implication is obvious and biting: Thorfinn is not now great, and he may never be. He is still just a boy, still made of anger. "That's right. You knew him. Thors?" 

“Knew him. Yes. Thors was a great warrior. The only true warrior I ever knew." It's like Thorkell to make grand statements, but not like this. Not admitted, without fanfare or challenge. “Though he looks more like Helga.”

They both watch as Thorfinn slips under the guard of the bigger man, right under his arm, and jams the butt of his knife into the side of man's neck. It'll bruise. Thorkell winces with his one eye and shakes his head. Vikings and Danes and the English alike aren't exactly known for their desire to go spending their spare time getting beaten, not when wine and food and women are more than abundant, but there's something of a warrior's pride in the forces he’s amassed. As soon as they see Thorkell with all his height and one eye and half-shorn fingers, they want to meet Thorfinn Karlsefni, who brought the giant down. 

And once they see Thorfinn in all _his_ scant height and messy hair and child's scowl, the challenge isn't far behind. Canute would prefer he not take them up on it, but when has his desire ever figured into whether Thorfinn would or wouldn't do something? Easier to stop the tide.

"How did he end up with Askeladd, then?" Canute asks.

The day they met, Thorfinn terrified him. He was as much dirt as boy, and the nails on his hands were black from hits taken on his knuckles, and his skin was rough and burnt with the glare of sun off snow. He was beautiful, too. It was like looking at Canute’s opposite. Another species of creature entirely. Unrefined ferocity, uncaring of who it was aimed at, with one singular goal, juxtaposed against Canute’s timidity and caution. 

They both grew up in bloodshed. Thorfinn simply handled it differently, Canute reasoned—but if his father was some legendary warrior turned homemaker, none of that past makes sense.

"Oh." Thorkell _hmms_ and turns to Canute so he can look at him, the tree above scattering dappled light over his form. Something about the look sends a skitter of cold up Canute's spine. "Thors died,” he says simply.

Died. 

But vikings do not simply die, falling over in a farm field in their twilight years, or falling asleep in a warm bed all wrinkled and greyed, passing in peaceful bliss surrounded by a loving family. Vikings die in war. They die bloody, steel in hand, and if Thors was a Jomsviking, that end is more sure than anything. 

And Thorkell hasn't answered his question.

Across the field, Thorfinn isn't finished, and neither is his opponent. Maybe Thorfinn has put on an inch since Canute started making him eat full meals, He’s filled out enough to be striking as he towers over his opponent. The man on the ground rolls in the mud and goes for Thorfinn's leg, but he jumps back out of reach. It gives enough distance that the man gets his feet back under him and how sword in hand. Not for long. Thorfinn comes for him head-on, and this is a move Canute recognizes. Askeladd used it on him in their duel. No weapon, no mercy, nothing fancy—one wicked punch to the man's jaw and another after it. This time the man stays down. Thorfinn doesn't spare him a glance but fishes his daggers from the mud and wipes them clean on his shirt. His embroidered, soft-spun shirt, which he was given a week ago. 

Canute almost sighs again.

Thorfinn looks across the training field the way Askeladd would have. He’s growing into Askeladd’s eyes and grace, though he had none of it when the man was alive. He is Askeladd’s son, as much or more than this mythic Thors. How young was he when Thors died? Not older than seven or eight.. 

A smile that would have been more fitting on Askeladd’s face ghosts across Thorfinn’s lips before he quashes it and just so, the answer to it all settles in Canute’s mind. 

Askeladd killed Thors. 

Of course he did. And then he had this waif of wrath following him, living off scraps. Stunted in height and attitude. Askeladd’s men might have tried to raise him better, but if he knows anything about Thorfinn, it’s that he would have thrown any offer of care back in their faces. They might have tried to leave him on the road, but Thorfinn would have followed. Bjorn might have tried to talk to him, but Thorfinn would have ignored him. And when it became apparent Thorfinn was a permanent fixture at the edges of their warring, Askeladd would have used him. Used him, to the edge of sanity.

Breakfast sours in Canute’s stomach as the look in Askeladd’s eyes the moment before Canute’s blade found his heart replays in his mind. He wasn’t looking at Canute or at the dead king or the men he was fighting.

He was looking at Thorfinn. Eyes wide, mouth open. In that moment, he wasn’t thinking about saving Wales or Canute or Canute’s throne. He was thinking of saving Thorfinn. His last words were for Thorfinn. His last thoughts in this world were for the boy he lead into war.

How must it feel to lose two fathers? Canute has only lost the one. Sweyn hardly counts. 

Now the man in the mud has his knees back under him and is trying to say something to Thorfinn. Maybe admiring, maybe to beg the favor of another fight. Whatever it is, Thorfinn doesn’t spare it a thought. He glances around, spots Canute and Thorkell, and walks off the field in the opposite direction. 

Thorkell makes a small, sad sound. 

Better to let him go, off to whatever business he has. Canute has never asked; it’s a wonder he’s gotten Thorfinn to eat indoors with them at all. But then, Canute is not Askeladd. He is the thing Askeladd put all his faith in, and if Askeladd trusted him to rule this country, to be his final revenge, then he might have trusted Canute with this duty, too. Canute will do this for him anyway, for Askeladd and for Thorfinn. 

He remembers a hand in his hair and thinks maybe for himself, too.

"Do you think Thorfinn would teach me how to use a dagger?" Canute makes an absent stabbing motion with one hand, and can’t bring himself to feel annoyed when Thorkell’s laughter echoes across the field.

"Lesson one—"

"You don't need to teach me how to hold it," Canute says. He's been taking lessons from Thorkell since he took the crown, because a King that can't use a sword isn't going to be King for long. Now he has some muscle, at least enough to block one direct hit from the massive man's blade. If he can hold a sword through that, he can hold a dagger—

Thorfinn butts the hilt of his own blade down on Canute's wrist. Pain explodes and he jerks back, dropping the blade as he does.

"That _hurt_ ," Canute whines. "You're supposed to teach me, not injure me."

Thorfinn sneers. "Sorry, princess."

Oh. That again. Canute closes his eyes because it’s that or roll them or glare or blush, and then he finds his dagger in the dirt and tries again. This time he's evidently done an even poorer job, because it warrants Thorfinn prying his fingers apart and pressing them back into place around the hilt with so little finesse that Canute thinks he might go ahead and break the fingers to get them into place if Canute can't do it right the next time. 

"Don't hold it like a sword," Thorfinn is saying. His voice is always more growl than not. "You're not big enough to fight like that beast, so don't try." Bold words from a man who has to lean back to look up at Canute to say so, but Canute nods.

It took shockingly little haranguing to get Thorfinn to agree to teach him anything. Canute asked after dinner, before Thorfinn could tear off into the night to do whatever it is he does before he comes crawling back to Canute’s room to make a space for himself by the door; caught him with a word and said, “It won’t be much of a victory if I don’t know how to fight,” nodding to the dagger sheathed at Thorfinn’s back, over the embroidered and fur-lined jacket that Canute gave to him to replace the blood-stained, bare leather he had before.

Thorfinn had frowned, given him a look like he thought Canute might stab himself with a dagger if he was let near one—nevermind the sword ever at his hip—and had nodded.

Regret only occurs to Canute the fourth time Thorfinn knocks him on his back. Canute might have height, but Thorfinn is fast and excels at getting him on the ground and then kneeling over him, sneering each time with such gusto that it almost begins to seem like a smile. Canute’s hair is a mess after the first hour and by the second, it’s only stubbornness keeping him on his feet at all. Scratches hash across his hands and there’s one on his neck, right across where it might have been lethal if Thorfinn were actually trying—but he’s not. It’s not compassion as much as lazy aggression, as if Canute simply isn’t worth the full brunt of his power and speed.

He’s not a good teacher, but Canute is a good student. When he gets his feet back under him, he’s ready for the blow. The hardest part is being scared of the blade, but Thorkell knocked that terror out of him early and Thorfinn did his part, too. 

Canute thumbs the scar across his cheek bone and takes a settling breath.

This time when Thorfinn comes at him, he turns aside and lets Thorfinn’s momentum carry him past. He’s fast; half a second and half a step and Thorfinn realizes his mistake and turns on him and oh—this is something Askeladd would have done, Canute realizes a moment too late, as Thorfinn’s bored look twists into rage.

What was it Askeladd had said to him that day in the snow? 

_Once the blood rushes to your head, you’re hopeless._

Hopeless, maybe, for a fighter like Askeladd. Not for Canute. Thorfinn comes on fast but haphazard; Canute starts blocking on instinct. 

By the end of that day he almost knows something about how to avoid a cut if not about how to make one. 

“Had enough?” Thorfinn asks the last time he gets Canute on his back in the dirt. His backside is numb from the constant falls, so he nods and starts to raise a hand to ask for help up before he realizes who he’s asking and for what and pushes himself up instead, with shaking arms. 

A small audience has gathered at the edge of their makeshift training area. He wills his shaking arms to stillness and stares down at Thorfinn with what he hopes is dignity once he gets himself standing, or at least with something better than the bone-deep tiredness he feels whenever he’s confronted with his own weakness. No one brings it out in him better than Thorfinn. “For today,” he musters. 

Thorfinn’s mouth sets itself in a flat line. “You can barely stand,” he says, but not loud enough for anyone else to hear. 

“We’ll do it again tomorrow.” 

“You’re so pathetic,” Thorfinn tells him, but there’s no real rage in it. 

At least someone still thinks so. 

In a way, it’s inevitable. His own prophecy playing out before him the first time he’s wounded in battle. It was his fault, his arrogance, to think he could be a more prominent figure. The crown asked it of him, and he, the fool, listened. 

The arrow pierces his arm below the shoulder, clipping through the cloth and chainmail and burying deep. Without thinking, he grabs it and tears it free, before even Floki can pretend to concern about it. A King riddled with arrows doesn’t strike much of a figure. 

It bleeds, soaks his arm in red by the end of the hour, but blood... This he's familiar with by now. Less often from his own veins, but not uncommon. Months of hard lessons at Thorfinn's hand have taught him how to take a blow or twenty. The wound almost isn't worth mentioning. Not for that first day. He scrapes it clean with snow outside his tent when they return to camp. Thorfinn's eyes following him like a flicker of flame at the edge of his vision, always bright and watchful. 

Canute fancies that the look is concern, that the sight of his blood at another’s hand has the capacity to bother Thorfinn, and lets that fantasy carry him into restless sleep along with the quiet whisper of Thorfinn's breath from his bedroll at the entrance. 

In the morning, the wound is wrapped in clean cloth. After another hard day’s ride, it aches, but no more. 

A day passes. His sleep is restless, his body feels slow and cumbersome, and every thought is slower than the last. He thinks it’s the days of fighting catching up to him. On an average day, he’s first up, last to sleep, and for all that he’s been training now for months, his body was raised in quiet churches and secluded rooms. What little endurance he build up was the benefit only of the occasional games of ball he could convince his brother Harald to join him in.

They return to the holdfast that evening. He puts himself to bed without dinner and counts it a victory that he doesn’t stumble on the way.

Thorfinn dogs him back to his rooms. “Aren’t you hungry?” he asks, as if the concept of someone not being hungry is too foreign to be comprehensible. 

Canute shrugs and winces; his arm is stiff. “No. Go break your fast. I won’t be killed in my sleep tonight.” This bit of wry humor is all that exists between them beside the deal and the sparring. Thorfinn snorts in answer and leaves without a word. Good. At least one of them has an appetite.

He strips his clothes off heedless of the dirt that’s still on him and slides into bed. At first, sleep eludes him, but it must come eventually because the next thing he knows he’s blinking awake to the sight of Thorfinn staring down at him, brow pinched. His cheek stings; judging by the light, it’s past morning and approaching midday. 

His arm collapses under him when he tries to push himself up. 

“What’s wrong with you?” Thorfinn asks, frustration coloring his voice—perhaps Canute is doing this just to vex him and him alone.

 _I’m not doing this on purpose_ , he tries to bite back, but his voice is warbled and weak, and something is wrong. His arm doesn’t hurt now; it’s almost numb, and that’s worse. His teeth are chattering.

“C—call Gunnar,” he manages, but even that much effort has the room spinning. 

No, it’s been spinning. The face in front of him is the only stationary object and even that is beginning to turn nauseatingly. Fear sours his stomach. He might be sick.

But Thorfinn makes no move to obey. He’s leaning closer, frown deepening from annoyance to confusion. “What? I’m not your servant.”

As if he would ever mistake Thorfinn for something so obedient. He and Thorkell really do deserve each other, Canute thinks. 

And the room goes utterly dark.

That day comes back to him later only in patches. 

People pile into his room, at times deafening, at times silent as the grave they must be waiting to bury him in. They unwrap his wound and cut it open and that he is awake for, though he doesn’t let himself scream. Someone tries to spoon broth into his mouth, but it comes back up minutes later. Across the room, the crown mocks him for his weakness from where it sits, and he starts to wonder if it really can speak after all. The only thing as bright is the gold of Thorfinn’s hair at the edge of his vision, always there.

Through all of it, Thorfinn stays by him. When they try to treat his wound once more, he sits behind Canute on the bed and holds him still with arms like bands of hard steel, until the pain and delirium start to mix, and it isn’t Thorfinn at all but the crown there, tightening around his chest, stealing his breath. 

When he has the strength for it, he fights.

He yells, he scratches, he kicks, and the voice in his ear says, “Shit, and I thought you pissed me off awake,” but after that the words become quiet and constant, like Canute is some animal in need of soothing.

His last moment of real lucidity comes as the shadows begin to stretch up the walls of his room and the light turns orange with the setting sun. Thorfinn is still there. When he sees Canute is awake, he leans down, staring down at him with eyes dark, as if it’s been a week and not a day and he’s as tired as Canute feels. 

Canute has tried for him. Endlessly, and full of selfish pride, he has tried to make Thorfinn into something more than his anger, but it was only arrogance, he realizes now.

“I’m sorry,” Canute says. 

Thorfinn’s eyes widen. The light catches them—he thought it was the sunset. It’s not. It flickers too bright. It’s night and the room is full of candles and fire. Thorfinn’s mouth works, but Canute finds his voice again first. This is important. This is all he has to give Thorfinn now. 

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry I killed him. I'm sorry I took him from you," Canute tells him, and knows he sounds mad. All the hardness he’s bred in himself these past months is dying now at the edge of fear and something larger, something vast and black. Somewhere behind Thorfinn, a specter flickers, blond hair shorn close, black armor over his chest—or no, it’s white, wrapped about his body, like a shroud. The vision shifts constantly, but always, it grins at him. It sees into his soul and laughs.

The sweat in his hair is clammy now; he feels at once colder than all the frigid mornings on their march put together, huddled under that one cloak, shared in the back of a wagon or beside the graves of the fallen villagers, fallen soldiers, knee deep in snow.

Thorfinn's hand against his forehead is a brand of fire. Canute presses into it without meaning to, his body beyond control. 

"You should leave when this is over. Go far away, go across the sea." His voice won't come the way he wants it to, but he keeps speaking, trying to breathe the words out because _that_ is what he wants. That image of Thorfinn at the helm of some great dragon-headed vessel, cutting across the waves toward something better, clean and bright and happy.

"Stop talking," Thorfinn bites. 

The hand on his forehead is replaced with a wet cloth. Thorfinn's eyes are always unreadable; now Canute can understand his expression only in separate pieces. Hard frown, wrinkle between his eyes, ragged hair and ragged soul.

 _Take care of yourself,_ Canute wants to order. If only it were so easy, if only anything were easy under the eyes of God, but nothing is, nothing will be, not here. Broken things don't fix themselves. Canute has no hand for labor like that. Thorfinn needs to heal. He needs to go far away.

His thoughts spin out until he can't gather even one to make sense. 

He can hear Thorfinn saying something now. A question, though Canute can't shape the edges of it. 

They aren't alone. Attendants and familiar faces gathered around his bed, ghosts and demons. A head of dark hair, crowned in gold, sitting disembodied at the foot of his bed, babbling nonsense. A balding man with a kind, familiar, patient smile, his hand on Canute’s knee. Thorkell and Floki both, wearing the same expression of regret, though it casts true only on one of their faces.

Thorfinn is yelling at them, he realizes, yelling at all of them, casting his arms wide. Always so full of rage.

Canute reaches blindly for him and catches the cloth of his shirt from behind. An order. He had one, something that needed to be said or argued. It felt so important. All noise stops. Thorfinn turns to look down at him and his eyes—oh. Canute has seen those eyes before. He had a sword in his hand, and a body at his feet, and how is it he can only gain this trust the moment he betrays it? 

Over and over, the same song. 

Shadows and dreams of ice.

It's a dream because it's warm. All those villagers bleeding red against the white of the snow, but Askeladd's men are gone and in their place are wolves, leaping in the snow, dancing though it, doing their mad work. Swords ring in the distance, chiming like bells. It should be cold, and it should be terrible, but it isn't, and the crown on his head is its own armor. He isn't scared at all. He stares at the villagers’ bodies and feels nothing.

Under his hand is warm fur. It’s a wolf, and then it isn’t, and it’s Thorfinn staring at him with hate in his eyes, and then it’s neither and he’s alone and the blizzard is sweeping him away, blurring his vision, sending him down into the dark.

He wakes with every pore of his skin sore, as if he's been fighting and running for days, and wishes for a moment he really were dead in some field of white, food for the wolves and crows. There's a weight against his legs, and the sound on his dreams that registered like a bell is the sound of steel on stone.

When he tries to wipe the haze from his eyes, his hand doesn't listen. His whole arm is heavy as stone. "Ugh," he tries to say, and almost manages an entire sound.

The ringing stops.

A rough hand grips his face without warning and twists it up and this way and that, and it turns out Canute can muster enough strength to bat the grip away with his good arm, but the hand is back in a second with a sound like a growl and then a wet cloth is dabbing at his eyes, wiping at the corners and under them and then at his forehead and cheeks and mouth too. Canute lets it happen for lack of strength to do anything about it. 

And then it stops, and he's left staring into a pair of honey eyes. That was always funny—the inconsistency, that someone like Thorfinn, made of salt and vinegar, would have eyes so sweetly colored. Against all composure, something in him cracks a bit with relief. It's not Floki standing over his bed with a sword or some advisor ready to explain what his days—weeks?—of sickness have wrought, not Thorkell ready to drag him out of bed, or a ghost to drag him somewhere else at last. No. It's only Thorfinn, who has only ever been one thing to him. 

His eyes are glassing up, so he closes them—

Thorfinn slaps him. Just lightly, almost a pat against his cheek. "Don't go back to sleep."

"Wh—" 

This time Thorfinn shoves a cup against his lips and tries to actually pour the water into Canute's open mouth, like that's how it works, drinking. But it's cool and fresh and clears his head a bit. It's daylight. Thorfinn is clean. Canute isn't—he can feel the dried sweat stiffening his nightshirt and sticking it to his skin, can almost smell it. 

He has never needed to relieve himself as bad as he does in that moment.

"I need—" Canute glances around too fast and his head spins. 

"Oh. That. You've been using a chamber pot," Thorfinn says as if it's nothing and not the most embarrassing moment of Canute's fragile life and helps him out of bed and to the pot behind a screen in the corner. If he's not already dead and trapped in a nightmare, condemned to God's hell, he would like to be. But Thorfinn has no more shame for this than he does anything, it seems, and by the time Canute is back to the bed, Thorfinn is almost carrying him.

"Where are they?" Canute asks to kill the blush his weakened body can't afford.

Thorfinn is back to his post, seated cross-legged on the end of the bed, leaning against one of its posts, dagger, cloth, and stone already back in hand. "Who?"

"Everyone—the men, Thorkell, the servants, the—"

"Sent them away."

He says nothing else. Doesn't even look up. 

_And they listened?_ Canute wants to ask, not sure if he's impressed or offended. What is Thorfinn that anyone would listen to him in a dying King's bedchamber? Even a queen wouldn't have authority there and Thorfinn is far from that. Canute rubs his forehead. It hurts, as all of him hurts, but now the headache is morphing into something with teeth.

"You… sent them away," Canute repeats.

"They looked like beasts, drooling over your body," Thorfinn says simply, with open disgust. He lifts his dagger from the stone again, wipes the water and residue from it before he sights along the blade, right at Canute. "But you're mine."

In the haze, his eyes really do look animal, and the blade elongates his face to something inhuman. Canute closes his eyes. Utter joy is rising in his fever-worn body. _But you're mine._ He is. Thorfinn means his death more than his life, but there's no light between the two, and Thorfinn already has the rest of him, too, whether he wants it or not. 

Canute is a fool. A delirious fool.

Calloused fingers scrape across his cheek again and then he's being pushed back down into the pillows. "Fine. Sleep. I'll keep them out.”

Canute can't muster a thank you or even a sound.

On the march again, and not a day too soon, and no one needs to know the King is tied into his stirrups. Thorfinn and Thorkell bicker as they ride, and Canute is happy for the distraction when the pain of holding himself to his posture becomes unbearable.

"When I'm sick, will you care for me? Feed me and wipe the sweat off my ass—"

"No."

“You’d let me die?” Thorkell asks, feigning the tragedy of it all.

“No,” Thorfinn says. “I’d put you out of your misery, old man.”

He has a way of saying it, so matter-of-fact that it doesn't sound like anything more than a man claiming the winter cold and the mud wet.

"He really would," mutters Thorkell. "Only for Canute, huh? Is it the hair? I can grow mine out."

"It's not the hair," Thorfinn growls. Canute must be dreaming all over again, trapped in delirium in his sick chamber. That's news to him though it shouldn't be, and he's still not sure what _it_ is they're talking about to begin with. He tugs a lock of his hair, like he once would have out of nerves. It is fine and pale and long, and it occurs to him that it wasn't hard to tug the tangles out of it after his bath that morning, which it should have been if he'd been in a bed tossing and turning with fever for a week. 

_Did you brush my hair?_ It's on the tip of his tongue to ask but the words die there. Where would Thorfinn learn to brush hair? He has many skills; that’s not one of them.

"Ahh," Thorkell moans in mock sorrow, "I knew it was the hair. The eyes." 

Canute prays for patience and strength as Thorfinn growls again and twists to him. 

"Don't tease him, please," Canute starts, but his voice isn't what it was and they're already off. Thorkell lives to get under Thorfinn's skin. They really do deserve each other. And Canute deserves none of this.

"Did you watch him while he slept? I saw you in there w—"

Thorfinn kicks his horse and Canute thinks he's about to canter ahead to do whatever it is he does on these days when he wants to do anything but pretend he answers to anyone but himself, but Thorfinn wheels around to face Thorkell instead. 

"I'll shave your head while you sleep if you don't shut up right now."

Thorkell stops dead. “Fine, fine.”

All that day, Thorfinn barely strays more than a few feet from his side. It’s disconcerting in the most extreme way. 

Canute makes a point of sitting beside Thorkell at the fire that night, knowing Thorfinn's newfound clinginess is ephemeral and won't win against his phobia of crowds. The group around the fire is always tight packed and loud once cold starts to set in. 

"What did you mean?" Canute asks Thorkell under his breath. In the aftermath, no one wanted to admit they thought the King was dying. No one has told him anything of what happened while he was away.

Thorkell frowns until he catches Canute tugging on his own hair, and then a grin slithers across his face. "That little stubborn ass wouldn't let a single person in your room. Even the serving girls." He snorts. "We had a bet he was in there eating you, one bite at a time, like a wild dog."

Yellow eyes, a flash of steel. "How much did you bet?"

"Ha." Thorkell reaches down to the pocket sewn into his heavy hide and clinks his pocket, heavy with coin. "I'd never bet against Your Highness."

"Then who took care of me?" it occurs to him to ask.

"He did," Thorkell says with a shrug. "Cleaned you, fed and watered you. A wonder you survived it, but I can't argue with the results." He taps his skin of ale against Canute's in a mockery of a toast and they both take a sip. "Our little nurse, Karlsefni."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [[fic on twitter](https://twitter.com/arahir/status/1216880440297918464?s=19)]
> 
> Thank you for reading!! Come join me on twitter where I post one (1) bad thing a day and forget to respond to dms.


	3. Chapter 3

Maybe it's a turning point. In his mind, he fights himself—pretends it means something, pretends it doesn't, and lies to himself that he doesn't care either way. 

Five nights later he wakes to the weight of a body at the end of his bed and the sound of a knife grinding in the dark, but feigns sleep until it takes him back. When he stumbles getting off his horse the next morning, Thorfinn is watching. When he can't stomach dinner, he finds a plate of bread in his rooms later, Thorfinn staring at it and him expectantly. It'll do no good to ask him. Canute can already hear the answer: _You're too weak. I don't want to fight someone pathetic._

A month after, a minor official of the Midlands comes to beg fealty and mercy, less for his people than his land. He's young and handsome, and he looks at Canute too long before he bows, and too long after. Later, in their room, Thorfinn offers to slit the man’s throat. The needless violence is unlike him, oddly enough, but when Canute asks why Thorfinn thinks he would want the man killed, the only answer he gets is not a sneer but genuine confusion. Canute wonders if he meant to make the offer at all. 

By the end of spring, he's strong enough to stay on his horse unaided and command his way through a battle. He needs to be there. His men see him in his red cloak and silver helm, his pale hair streaming behind him, and they look to him like a touchstone. Easy to serve something with dignity and even easier when the fight is a winning one, with free rations and beer after. Thorfinn was a grudging shadow before, but now he dogs Canute's steps like he really is some great beast brought to heel. He doesn't seem happy about it, or like he wants to be there—more that he doesn't trust Canute to stay alive on his own after almost dying to a minor arrow wound. What he said while he was sick, he can't remember, though sometimes, when he catches Thorfinn staring at him with something other than loathing, he wants to ask. 

A spar will settle him again, Canute thinks. Once they've fought, he'll be back to his distant self. It's nearly the height of spring before he has enough strength to try.

After breakfast, he nods to Thorfinn and jerks his head to the servant's entrance. Canute already has his hair up and is wearing his loose training clothes. Thorfinn reads his meaning and follows him out into the bright morning.

Thorfinn looks good. A little less hard, a little less desperate. Maybe a winter of solid meals is what he needed. Canute has a mad vision of wintering in a cabin, of Thorfinn coming in the door with a brace of rabbits over his shoulder, of sharing a meal and quiet words over a simple table.

His mind has been odd since his sickness; he shakes his head to clear it as they reach a part of the nearby woods that will be private enough for their spar. If he falls in the first minute, Thorfinn will be witness enough.

A month and a half out of practice, Canute is ready to fail. What he isn’t prepared for is Thorfinn’s caution. Thorfinn doesn't pull his first strike—he misses it entirely. Same with the second, and the third, which doesn’t come close enough to move the strands of hair that have fallen around Canute’s face. 

"Are you actually going to fight me?” Canute raises a brow and holds his dagger out the way Thorfinn taught him not to. “I can go ask someone else.”

And it works. Thorfinn's gaze clouds. 

He comes straight on. He kicks after his next blow, a cleave that's easy to block, though the swipe to the side of Canute’s knee isn't. Canute stumbles back but keeps his feet long enough to bring his blade up in a sweeping move that's pure instinct, and the worst of it—wide and sloppy. He really is out of practice. Thorfinn bats it aside and the residual momentum sends Canute sprawling on his back. 

Thorfinn looms over him a moment, both of them breathing hard, and Canute can do nothing but stare up at him. He's grown. Filled out, gained inches. His hair gleams in the sun. Canute lets his eyes linger on the wide stretch of his shoulders and the hint of bare, damp skin at his neck, and knows this he'll never be rid of. Now he greets the twist of longing like an old friend and takes the hand Thorfinn offers him without guilt. 

"You need to learn to fight." 

Canute wipes his forehead and starts picking at the leaves caught in his hair. "Isn't that what we're doing?"

Thorfinn snorts. "No. With your hands." He squeezes the one still in his grip, hard enough to grind his bones together. Ah. The gesture was too generous after all, and still, a part of Canute revels even at the harsh touch. 

"Fine. Teach me how to fight," Canute says at last, resigned. It will go no better than their dagger sparring, but then, the point was never to learn.

It was to be here, with Thorfinn, like this. 

They stand a few feet apart, Thorfinn with his hands at his side, Canute unsure what to do but unwilling to raise his hands like a parody of some animal rampant for the kill. When Thorfinn moves, it’s with all his usual speed if none of his grace. The hit comes right at Canute’s center, and then they’re grappling. Size is Canute’s only advantage, but it’s still an embarrassment; they’re on the ground in seconds, grunting as they vi for the top. The tie on Canute’s hair comes loose after a moment and then his shirt comes open, too. Canute tries to grab at Thorfinn's hands as Thorfinn tries to pin him them to the ground, but it's only putting off the inevitable. He supposes he should be lucky that Thorfinn doesn't go for his face straight out. It would be a shame to lose an eye the way Thorkell did.

In a last-ditch effort at not losing completely, he heaves his full weight against Thorfinn. 

It works. Canute rolls on top of him and pins him to the ground artlessly, with nothing more than his weight. Thorfinn looks stunned at the turn, staring up at him, eyes wide and black with rage. He really might try to take an eye, Canute thinks, and with the thought his grip loosens.

Thorfinn growls and twists their legs together and finds the momentum to flip their positions. His pin is much less gentle. He traps Canute's wrists and crushes them to the ground on either side of Canute's head. Even as Canute tries to use his size again to force him off, Thorfinn gives a small grunt and holds him there, victory making his eyes bright. Canute would yield, should yield, but he doesn’t want to. This, somehow, is different than losing with a dagger at his throat or jammed against the small of his back. This is too close, too personal. One day, he’ll win this fight, he promises himself, but he’s not strong enough yet. All Thorfinn’s rough edges make him weaker.

"Enough," he gasps, and heaves his shoulders once more, avoiding any rise of his hips, because being pinned under Thorfinn is a situation his body finds far too agreeable.

But Thorfinn is immovable. The look on his face is more wild than usual, his breath harder. It's a good look for him; if Thorfinn doesn't get off soon, that's going to be a problem. It already is. 

“Yield,” Thorfinn tells him. 

As if he’s ever needed it said before. Once more, Canute tries to move him, but this time Thorfinn sees it coming. With a grunt, Thorfinn pushes him back down into the leaves and grass and this time, he uses all of himself. Small, but still heavy. Still strong. Canute gasps at the spike of raw pleasure as Thorfinn’s thigh jams between his legs—too much, too fast. He hasn’t a prayer of hiding it. And now Thorfinn is staring down at him with an entirely different expression.

“You—” he starts. He presses down again, gentler, and it’s not too much this time. Canute breathes in. He can't figure out what the look on Thorfinn's face is. Anger or confusion. Has he really never done this? Canute did once, after he abandoned God. Ironic that all the priests' warnings against touching himself were a kind of guide as to where to start on his life of sin. It was good, but all he had seen in his mind's eye at the peak was a hard mouth set in a sneer and eyes that burned like the sun. He wanted to sin, but he didn't want to know himself that well. Not then. 

Thorfinn has never had a book and teachers to warn him from this particular path. It's hard to imagine living with Askeladd's mercenaries didn't teach him something about the world, but then, it’s hard to imagine him sitting around their camp fire, sharing bawdy tales. He’s always had a one-track mind.

He does for this, too. Canute untangles their legs and brings his knees up, bracketing Thorfinn in, unsure what he’s after but unwilling to let this first and last opportunity go untested. Thorfinn pushes into him, and he’s hard, too. It’s simple and messy, awkward, and the best thing he’s had in a long, long time.

God, he thinks, would shame him for this. But God has already forsaken them all. The thought only makes it better. Pleasure rises, foreign and overwhelming, as Thorfinn pushes into him. 

He gives up trying to hold Canute’s wrists in place as they move together. He pushes his face into Canute's neck, hiding whatever expression he's making, breathing hard and loud. Once his hands are free, Canute doesn't know what to do with them, doesn't know what part of Thorfinn he would be allowed to touch the way he wants to. The curve of his cheek, maybe, or his hair. Instead he goes for Thorfinn’s shirt, rakes his hand up Thorfinn’s back and does it again when it earns him a louder huff of air against his neck.

He wants to twist them over, pin Thorfinn in turn, chase his own pleasure, but the crest rises so fast it takes him utterly by surprise. Better this way than when he did it himself, better by far, with stars behind his lids. All the pained places in him go numb for a few long moments as Thorfinn makes a wounded sound against his ear and his almost frantic movements cease.

And then they're two boys covered in sweat and leaves and dirt, and worse.

Canute tries to sit up, but Thorfinn is still heavy and still there and still dedicated to proving something. "Up," Canute orders, though all the authority is ruined by how ragged his voice is. Bold of him to assume he can order Thorfinn to do anything, but Thorfinn listens for once. He raises his head, sits back a little gingerly and stares at Canute's lap until Canute wants to slap him for the audacity. 

"Huh," he says. 

Just that. And then he rises and picks his dagger from the dirt and leaves Canute to do the same with himself.

Canute has never been good at lying to himself. It was never an option, growing up the sickly child in a family build on blood and the act of taking it. The writing was on that wall early. To be sent to hold London Bridge, unexperienced, against the Jomsvikings, was an inevitability. He never expected to return home, and he never told himself a pretty tale about why, no matter how insistently optimistic Ragnar was. So when Thorfinn drags him off for training before they've even had breakfast the next day, insists they fight without blades, and pins him full to the ground within a few minutes with rabid focus, it's not a surprise what follows. Canute starts feeling that gaze on him at odd hours of the day, at least as heavy as the crown, and demanding at least as much of his attention. The pretense of the spar is always there, but it starts to fail by the time summer’s heat is on them. They still spar, but in between the march and the courting of petty lords and the constant maneuvering of war as they wait for Harald’s reinforcements, they find time to go further afield to find quieter places. They walk out together, and one of them will motion ahead, _Just a bit further, just behind those trees,_ and Canute’s gut jumps at the prospect.

It isn’t love, but it is good, and that’s enough.

Gunnar comments on it first—which is saying something, given Thorfinn's existence at all is a point of constant terror for him. When Canute wants a moment of peace, all he need do is order Thorfinn to his side and watch the rats scatter as if before a cat. Over dinner one night, Gunnar asks if Thorfinn is well. Canute thinks it’s a funny way to ask if Thorfinn is planning any murders, and Gunnar’s specifically. It doesn’t bear answering; Canute hardly knows the answer. 

What sits between them now itches under his skin, a constant discomfort, a constant want. 

“What did you do to him?" a familiar voice asks at dinner a night later, too loud. Thorkell is a conspicuous presence in any room. 

"To who?" As if Canute doesn't know.

Thorkell nods across the room, where Thorfinn has set up in a solid brood by the entrance. "Karlsefni. He looks like he wants to eat you alive."

Canute chokes on his grape. "Nothing, I hope. He wants to kill me anyway. He will, one of these days.

Now it's Thorkell's turn to laugh. “Kill. That’s what that look means, huh.” He reaches over and thumps Canute on his shoulder, hard enough to rattle the chair he's sitting in, and the table, too. "Well, they say this winter is going to be hard. No one would blame you for keeping a warm bed. No accounting for taste, huh?" This seems to be a really good joke and he laughs again.

No, no accounting for taste. In the heat of the hall, Thorfinn has his coats off, and the dark blue tunic beneath hugs his frame. The lacing is coming undone at his throat and his sleeves are bound with leather. For once, he's not alone. He’s started making quiet conversation with the Jomsvikings lately, answering questions when they’re asked and with more than a single syllable. His constant frown has eased. Before, he had a sad beauty, like one of the icons Canute prayed over, so wounded, so impassioned. Now, he’s simply handsome. It’s better, and it’s worse. 

“It doesn’t bother you?” Canute asks. 

Thorkell scratches at his beard and then says, “No. But I wanted to take him to Mercia with me. I could use him.”

Soon he’ll be on the march. Thorkell will break Mercia from the east. Harald’s men will join from the north. Canute will go with them, to clean up what’s left, accept truces and make deals. Mercia and then Aethelred and then England. And then everywhere else. Once they have the Midlands, everything will fall into place, and the weak king’s power will crumble about his ears. 

“If you’d rather keep him…” Thorkell starts, the implication clear. Keep Thorfinn, like a beast. No. 

The heat falls out of him, sucked away, and then the coldness of the gold weighing on his head washes over him. Thorfinn is no thing to be kept. And Canute is no maiden to be sighing after a warrior. A year ago, he was resigned to this; he knew what he felt even then, knew it as one more piece of the world he couldn’t contend with or hope to control, but then the priest explained love to him. It was selfish and self-serving, he said. The ice was love, death was love. This was want, and Canute embraced it. He would have Thorfinn in his bed. He would waste all the late summer with him and think of Mercia not at all, and Thorfinn would be his creature until the day his teeth came out and showed him for the wolf he really was. 

Or worse: Thorfinn would tame, and stay bound to him, the way he was to Askeladd, with nothing more than the distant hope of revenge to feed him. They would find their pleasure in each other, but never speak of it. Never let it be more.

Of late, in battle, he’s had a look about him. Resigned and sour. He goes scouting and comes back with blood on his face, and a perfect report of who is where and doing what, but after he doesn’t ask Canute for a spar or for a meal or for anything else. He goes to his bedroll and says nothing. 

Canute thinks of Askeladd’s aching tiredness that day in the snow, when he beat Thorfinn nearly to death, the frustration obvious in his every word and move, finally weary of the creature he made.

“Take him,” Canute murmurs, picking at his plate, though his appetite is gone. “But have a care. You know he’s reckless.”

Thorkell looks at him a moment, eyes wide with shock before the expression shutters into a sly joy. Anything for the fight. But Canute keeps his gaze steady. _Bring him back to me_ , he hopes it says. 

Thorkell tips his cup toward Canute’s and smiles. 

Thorfinn fights him on it. Loudly, at length.

“We had a deal. You can’t break it,” he yells ten minutes in, his voice cracking around the edges.

“I’m not breaking it. You—” Canute starts to say, but then isn’t sure what he should say. He always uses the wrong words with Thorfinn. _I won’t die while you’re gone; you can come back and kill me later._ His mind has no trouble shaping the hurt that would cross Thorfinn’s face, though neither of them would know why, and Canute would be angry at himself and angry with Thorfinn and angry at the world, too, for how nebulous this thing between them is. 

So he doesn’t say anything more, and Thorfinn makes a sound a step too close to a growl as he tears away and back down the hallway and out into the night to throw knives at trees or scream at the moon or whatever it is he does when life becomes too much to deal with piece by piece.

He comes back later; slips into Canute’s room at the small hours of the morning, perches on the end of Canute’s bed and does nothing but stare at the low fire in the hearth. 

That’s when he knows he’s made the right decision. With the weight of the crown off his head and the heat of the feast hall gone and nothing but the persistent ache in the hollow of his throat that reminds him his selfish love is still his and still precious, he knows. He can be responsible for Thorfinn, can care for him and feed him, train with him and hold him, but he can’t own him. This same obsessive care Thorfinn had for Askeladd and he lied to himself until the end about that. 

Whatever he is to Thorfinn, he doesn't want it to be a lie. 

All Thorfinn's arguments are dead by morning. He goes perched on the back of the black horse Canute gave him, with nothing more than a scowl and one of Canute’s spare fur capes wrapped about him, to keep the coming chill off both their minds. Thorkell is a mountain beside Thorfinn; at the head of a disorganized column they march out the gates just past sunrise, the Jomsvikings loud and gleeful with the prospect of war. Before they go, Thorfinn turns his gaze back, only half his face showing against the pale mist in the fields ahead. 

The look is unreadable. Something like longing twists through the pit of Canute’s stomach. He shoves it away, the way he’s getting practiced at, the way he does with all the reminders of his old softness. Save this one, until now.

His father would be proud.

That’s the last he sees Thorfinn for more than a season.

The distance clears his mind, and step by step, all of the Midlands fall into his hands. At the cusp of fall, Mercia calls a truce. Canute orders Thorkell’s troops back, and soon he’s standing atop a pile of Mercian treasure, picking up coins and letting them slip through his fingers like all the gold in the world is nothing better than sand. He tells the lord it's not enough and he burns pyres across the countryside to show that he can burn more. He sees fear in a man’s eyes and smiles.

And if sleep runs from him at night without the sound of Thorfinn's restless presence, if he wears himself ragged training with whoever will meet him, if he searches the hall for a tired, wry glance and finds it absent, that’s nothing compared to victory. 

The crown demands everything and begs for more. Canute is happy to give it.

"Where's Thorfinn?" he asks when he can steal a moment of peace that first night back. Thorkell has barely forgiven Canute for ordering his troops back before the fight was done, but the night of feast and drink has soothed some of his anger. An itch sits under Canute’s skin. His hair is down, and his clothes are the same red his men have come to expect and respect The crown is still on his head, though he wishes for the moment it were anywhere else.

Thorkell rolls his eyes without looking up from his plate. "Like I give a shit." 

The ire is strange on him. If Thorfinn chopping two of his fingers in half and poking an eye out was all in good fun, what must it take for Thorfinn to truly piss him off? Canute eyes him and feels a wriggle of worry crawl up his spine. "Did something happen?"

"No. Nothing happened.”

“Nothing?”

Thorkell stabs at his meat, fist balled around his knife. “I thought I was going to see him fight, but instead, do you know what I saw?" He waits for Canute's frown and then stabs the meat again, harder, sending bits of food flying across the table. "Nothing. He didn’t fight. I told him if he deserted, I’d cut his head off. He told me I could try. Said he wasn’t paid to be there.”

And... he's not, Canute realizes. Room and board, yes. New clothes, a new bow last spring, a horse of his own last winter. A bedroll, because Canute couldn't convince him to sleep anywhere but the floor. Whatever else he wanted and most of what he needed but would never ask for Canute’s care and his pleasure and all his spare thoughts, and a duel one distant day--this was the given price of his service. It hadn't occurred to Canute to offer him a wage, too. 

Canute laughs. The sound is unfamiliar to his own ears. “He’s right,” Canute says. “When did you see him last?” 

“Three days ago.” It takes Canute a moment to realize what the expression on his face is. Pouting is an odd look for a man so big and so terrible, but then, Thorfinn has always had that effect. It doesn’t help that he was deprived of the end of the battle he wanted. Thorkell doesn’t believe in truces on a philosophical level.

Three days, though. Canute tries not to let his disappointment show. An insidious voice whispers that this is good, that he’s about to take England, he can’t suffer distractions, but the thought doesn't stick. He has a plate piled high with various pickings from the feast sent to his rooms, in case he has a visitor, and hates himself for the optimism.

But it's not misplaced. How Thorfinn finds his borrowed room is a mystery, but he always has, and this night is no different. It’s well past sunset by the time Canute makes his excuses and finds his way to bed. The moment he steps in the room, he knows he’s not alone. Excitement sparks in the pit of his stomach.

"You're here." The words slip out like a question before he can stifle them. 

Against the wall, close enough to the fire to gather the heat, and still stand in shadow. Dramatic but, unaffected. 

“I missed you at the feast.”

Thorfinn's face does something odd, seems to twist between three expressions at once before he stares off at the fire instead. "I didn't want to get yelled at again. He's annoying."

Thorkell. "He's... a handful," Canute says.

It's as if the conversation is happening to someone else. Too mundane, too friendly. A new calmness sits on Thorfinn's brows, lending his features some grace they didn't have before, so it’s not pinched and lined with all the weight of what he was holding back. He's still holding something, though. His arms are tense where he has them folded across his chest, and he won't look at Canute for more than a moment. 

Canute moves toward the table at the wall and undoes his robes and his belts and the chain mail that's just for show today but so heavy it used to leave welts on him when he first started wearing it. "There's food," he says, and motions toward the plate the servants left without looking. Thorfinn doesn't move or speak, but Canute can feel his eyes. 

It's like those first days together, in reverse. He couldn't stop looking at Thorfinn beside him in that cart, trying to pick out what about him was so different, how he could hold himself so careless and confident, like a wolf with blood on its jowls, God's perfect creation. Whatever Thorfinn is looking for tonight, whatever it is he sees, it isn't that. Canute's hand almost shakes as he lays the crown aside, the last piece of his armored regalia, and turns.

Thorfinn is still leaned against the wall, face in shadow, watching him. A tension sits in the space between them, so thick he could cut it if he wanted. And he could. He could order Thorfinn out and pretend to ignorance, and maybe Thorfinn really would go, fight or no. But the crown is on its pillow now and all of its demands are nothing more than suggestions, getting fainter by the second. His blood skips in his veins when Thorfinn walks over to him and stands between his legs, which have spread to make him a space, and when he reaches up and draws his fingers along the scar over Canute’s cheek, Canute has the mad wish to take his palm and kiss the rough, scarred skin of it.

Thorfinn’s gesture isn't affectionate, though. It’s almost like he's checking the mark is still there. 

Canute wants to touch his hair and the line of his jaw, but it would be like breaking some unspoken promise. There are parts of Thorfinn he can touch; that isn’t one of them. That is for lovers and wives. He doesn’t know the first thing about that, but he knows what they aren’t. Long ago, before he was king, before he was even much of a prince, he worried Thorfinn would find a girl. It was the petty jealousy of a one-sided, distant love.

But now he doesn’t worry. Thorfinn bites up at his neck, Canute sighs and slides his hands under Thorfinn’s shirts, pulls him in by the hips and holds him there. It’s just like sparring, he tells himself. Less clothes. A better reward. 

Their first time is hurried, and neither of them last, but after, the night stretches, slow and languid. He underestimated how much he missed it, though all he thought about in Thorfinn's absence were the odd bits and ends of him: how his calloused hands felt on bare skin, the smell of him fresh from a bath he didn't want to take, how warm he was close-up. Now it all hits at once, and it overwhelms him. Not for the first time, Canute wishes he knew more about what to do here, but in this he's still naive. Thorfinn might know, but whatever it is Askeladd's warriors did with women, it's not something either of them want.

They exhaust themselves on each other, until Canute feels drunk off nothing more than touch and shared breath, and peace has settled into every limb and bone in his body. Afterward, Thorfinn stays beside him in bed, a warm presence. Not close, not affectionate, just there, as if moving anywhere else isn't worth the effort. The plate of food finds its way to his hands and Canute accepts the corner of bread Thorfinn hands him without comment, too tired to be surprised at anything more in a single day.

"Thorkell said you wouldn't fight."

Thorfinn looks up from where he's hunched over the food. "Why would I?"

"But—" But I thought you liked fighting. But I thought you lived for it. Even as he thinks it, he knows it's wrong. Thorfinn doesn't live to fight; he fights to live. "You fought for Askeladd."

Thorfinn doesn’t reply.

"I guess I can't order you to," Canute says with a little sigh in it. He wouldn't, if he could. Thorfinn is a glory on the battlefield, but it's like watching a whole building go up in flame. Hard to look away, even when the heat burns.

Thorfinn snorts, and mutters, "You can’t order me to do shit. I'm not your dog, princess." 

Pain spikes through his center, the words a perfectly aimed bolt, even though it's what he wanted, even though it's why Canute sent him away. "I know you're not," Canute murmurs, voice thin. 

Thorfinn watches him. Canute can almost see his mind turning. Before, he was a raw nerve exposed to the world, all action and reaction. Now, he's thinking before he speaks and acts. It's a triumph, and it's terrifying.

"If you really want me to fight," Thorfinn starts, turning back to his plate, "you know what I want." 

For a moment, Canute thinks it's sex he means, but realization slams into him a moment later. A duel. Their promised fight. Hard to build a paradise on Earth if you're dead, he thinks with bleak humor, and leans back against the pillows, eyes closed, feeling older than Sweyn looked at the end.

A few moments later he hears the plate click against stone as its set on the floor, and then the blankets and furs shift, and there are hard hands sliding over his skin, turning him over in the dark and pulling him in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [[fic on twitter](https://twitter.com/arahir/status/1219807022993985538?s=19)]
> 
> You'll note the chapter length has changed, because the last bit got a little long. Should be up around the same time timeframe as the rest. Thank you always for reading!


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long! But hopefully the fact it's longer than the rest of the fic put together will make up for it some!

"I thought you weren't coming,” Canute says under his breath, eyeing Thorfinn. They’re all worn from travel, weary from the hunt, and though Thorfinn wears it better than the rest of them, there’s no reason for him to be here.

For a season now, they’ve chased the English army. Or what’s left of it. Across the Midlands, through fields and past corpses and burned out villages. Canute’s men stopped looting after the third round of executions. King Aethelred is dead and gone—The Unready, they call him now, for how thoroughly he was broken—and now his son Edmund is wounded and desperate. 

The men are tired, but an odd energy fills the clearing where they’re staging for this final fight. An excitement, animal in its hunger. They’ve run their prey to ground here in this edge of the world forest, and the day seems too peaceful for what's about to happen, for what's already happening. Somewhere ahead the last of a limping army is running for its life. 

A single look at Thorfinn banks his excitement better than water on fire. His hair now is long enough to tie back in full, and he’s grown the scrag of beard Canute never could. It reminds him of Willibald, who looked thirty years his senior until they shaved him. The priest is back at the main camp, drinking himself to death, and Canute had hoped they might leave Thorfinn there with him, or with Thorkell’s contingent, where he could at least delight in pissing Thorkell off by refusing him even the delight of a spar. 

But, as Thorfinn is happy to remind him, he takes no orders from Canute or from the crown atop his head. Thorfinn gives half a shrug in answer. All other Kingly duties he’s happy enough to let Canute weather alone, or with his added contribution of little more than a sly glance and roll of his eyes, a clever comment later in their room.

Canute doesn’t say that, and doesn’t say that it’s been the better of two seasons since Thorfinn fought anyone for blood, or that even with all that time and distance, his nightmares still wake them both more nights than not, but then, the book of all he doesn’t say to Thorfinn is too heavy to carry around. He lets it go and eyes Thorfinn from under his bangs.

Something about his posture is odd, shoulders hunched and tense, hands restless as they check and recheck the dagger at his back. He keeps looking around at the trees dressed in red and gold, swaying in the mid-morning breeze. 

“What is it?” Canute asks. Thorfinn’s restlessness is contagious. It’ll spread to him, and then to the men. 

looks to Canute and offers under his breath, “I could just kill him. It would be easy. Fast.”

His first offer. Canute’s mind goes blank as the words absorb, and then rushes two ways at once. The image of Thorfinn hunting down his prey for him, gold-haired fury and faster than a hawk on the wing, beautiful in his ferocity—and then the image of Thorfinn with blood on his hands and steel in his eyes overtakes it. Thorfinn who sweats and murmurs and cries in his sleep.

No. Patience, Canute has learned, is far more valuable than gold. 

He steps into Thorfinn’s space, letting the horses shield them from sight for a moment. Whatever it is Thorfinn wrestles with, whatever battle he's fighting, it's one else can win for him, and it leaves no room for him to take any other opponent. Canute would have to be a fool to let him onto the field. In truth, he doesn’t want Thorfinn within a mile of a serious fight—and not only because it would feel like sawing a part of himself off and throwing it to his enemies. 

“Thorfinn…”

“What? Are you going to tell me you don’t want him dead?” he asks, which is somehow better than what Canute was going to say. _I don’t need you to fight for me._

And he doesn’t. He can fight for himself, now. Not to beat Thorfinn, maybe, but he has callouses, has muscle, and battle-sense enough not to get himself killed. 

“I’m going,” Thorfinn says before he can open his mouth again, and it’s not a tone that can be argued with. He does this sometimes, now. Done is the slouching and hiding and living life like a condemned man or some beast out of its cage. He's changed. Somehow, out of sight, Thorfinn became something else. Not a great man, not yet. But the shade of who he could be is there and Canute wants to shake his secrets out of him—how does not fighting make a man great? As King, he's wrung every drop of respect and renown from this land and his men, blood from a stone, and fought for every inch of it. Thorfinn simply exudes it, without effort, without fail.

He does now, even dressed down in nothing but brown leather and a thin cloak. 

If they were alone, he'd let himself admire that, but their short conversation has already earned looks from a few of the men. Not condemning, but a little too interested. Thorfinn is an enigma, and his refusal to fight now isn't seen as a coward's choice but merciful. _How good must he be?_ _It’s not even a challenge._

Canute steps away, takes a deep breath and murmurs, "Floki.”

His general nods and starts issuing orders; the men clam up and mount their horses without another errant glance. Canute longs for days when Thorfinn's favorite pastime was glaring almost literal daggers at anyone who made the mistake of glancing at him. It would save them both trouble. 

Thorfinn falls into place beside him at the head of the column, though there are three bands of scouts ahead already, tracking their quarry.

It feels too easy. 

He feels Thorfinn’s gaze on him and turns to see Thorfinn half-frowning, casting his gaze around the trees. They muffle the sound, make everything too quiet. For once, he wishes Thorkell were there instead of half the country away, keeping the rest of the English army occupied. Divide and maybe not conquer, but at least stay busy. That’s more than half the battle when it comes to keeping thousands of Danes and converted English happy, he’s learned—and the rest is keeping them fed. 

They pause at a fork in the path, though it's clear which Edmund's army took. It's barely a fork anymore—one road barely better than a trail while the other has been tamped down by a few thousand feet. Discarded armor, bits of soiled cloth, a charred spot where someone started a desperate fire to cook what game they could catch on the road. Canute has been part of an army on the run, and so has Thorfinn. They share a look and Thorfinn nods. 

"We'll split here," Canute orders the rest of the men.

It was always the plan. No sense in attacking from one direction when two is just as easy, and cornered animals are the most dangerous. The forest hides too much and numbers are no advantage in a place like this. Surprise is Edmund's only advantage, but he would have to be truly desperate to use it. Running is his only hope of getting out of this alive.

At least, that’s what Canute hopes. He’s not the strategist Askeladd was. He can hear the mercenary second guessing him at every turn, and every mistake he makes serves him with a vision of Askeladd’s cunning grin. Always the fool. Part of him is grateful Thorfinn is there, though it’s a selfish thought.

Without realizing it, he's reined his horse closer to Thorfinn's, and Thorfinn casts him a look that's glowing bravado. _Scared?_ it asks, and if Canute were even a little less dedicated to looking dignified, he might kick Thorfinn's leg for it. 

He's not scared. He's cautious. He's always been cautious. 

Thorfinn watches him for the next few minutes on and off, still half-smiling, with just an edge of tooth showing. He's not often amused. Of course, seeing Canute riled and out of his element would do it. 

At least he has the capacity to amuse Thorfinn, if little else. 

But half a bell in, he’s tired of fighting off his own smile, and tired of the familiar pang in his chest that reminds him this is not what he wants it to be. He’s stopped naming it in his head, stopped letting himself think about it too deep or too much or too often, because if he does, it always comes down to the same question. When Thorfinn has decided what he wants to be after all of this, will it be someone who serves a King? 

He fears the answer is no, and hopes the answer is no, and hates himself for asking every time. 

Canute breaks his gaze away and starts to kick his horse into an easy trot to outrun his own thoughts—but Thorfinn doesn’t let him go. He wheels his horse in front of Canute’s and grabs the reins from his hands, pulling Canute's house to a dead stop for him. 

“What?” he starts, but catches the rest at the look in Thorfinn’s eyes. Something about the way he’s holding himself is familiar. 

With a single raised hand, Canute stops the rest of the column cold. It's the silence of anticipation. Of a held breath. In the silence, the sound of the arrow coming off a bow reverberates. The shaft beds itself in the neck of a man Canute doesn’t know the name of, and he falls. The quiet is perfect for a moment, and then his men are yelling, and there are more men in the trees coming toward them with swords in hand, and utter chaos descends.

Better kings than he might revel in the glory of an open battle, but to him it's only ever been what it is: the rush of sound, frenetic action interspersed with pockets of confused calm, and the waste of it all. Of time, of men, of money, of good will. 

The smell of blood and the screams of men and horses ebbs and flows around him. Their numbers are well matched, which means the bulk of Edmund's force is here, and by extension, the King himself can't be far off. This was his last gamble: take out Canute in one quick attack, by some freak chance. 

But it won't be so easy. 

Canute’s guards are personally chosen. All quiet, steadfast; they make a wall around him. The rear guard will already have sent someone to Floki’s contingent. All they need do until then is not let their king die. There are no orders to give aside from attack, and he's not stupid enough to throw himself headfirst into the fight for nothing but glory. Instead, he's the quiet center of a storm, holding himself still and ready as he can be, trying to keep in mind every underhanded attack Thorfinn has tried him with in their hundreds of fights. But it's not as though anyone can get close enough. The first few who attempt to get to him are cut down with laughable ease, but then as the battle shifts around them, he realizes why—the men aren’t focused on him at all. Instead, they’re cutting his guard off from the rest of the force foot by foot. 

Divide and conquer, and it's working. Thorfinn notices at the same moment. Just as Canute is about to issue an order, his horse jerks under him; Thorfinn still has hold of the reins, he realizes, and is casting his gaze about the road with an edge of something that can’t be panic but almost is. 

“Sir,” one of the guards starts, and they all seem to see it at the same time. The crown on Edmund’s head is not a match for the one Canute wears. It’s far finer, far more stately—and Canute isn’t wearing his anyway. Only a band to hold his hair back. It was a promise he made himself; until he won it in full, until England was his, he wouldn’t wear it on the field. Edmund is positioned on a red horse with his own guard a few dozen yards away.

And then, beside him, two of his own men ride up. Not guards, but archers, with arrows already nocked on 

Oh. He means to win that way. The thought settles over his mind like terror and then, without warning, Thorfinn jumps at him. He’s fast; Canute has known this from the start—he’s always been fast, and all their spars were a farce, because he’s on the ground with the wind knocked out of him before the first arrow hits home.

One goes wide. One hits a guard in the shoulder—maybe he’ll live. Canute watches the scene from the ground, gasping for air even as Thorfinn rises and pulls him back to standing, supporting him with an iron grip for the moment it takes to get his feet under him. Not dignified, but neither is assassination.

Thorfinn stands between them. His stance is tense, hunched, and oozing something familiar. It feels like cold oil sliding down his spine, the discomfort of watching it, of seeing him transform from the languid thing he was in bed that morning to this—this is only human in shape, and if Canute could see his eyes he knows what he would find there. Nothing familiar.

“Thorfinn, wait—”

The name falls on deaf ears. Distantly, he wonders if there’s any circumstance where Thorfinn would listen to him. The sounds of the battle behind them fade as runs forward, and it’s a challenge to keep track of him. 

Edmund realizes what’s happening, but it’s too late. He tries to wheel his horse around as one of the arches looses a half-nocked arrow in Thorfinn’s general direction and gets a knife in his hand for the trouble, and another in his neck. The second archer tries to run, too, but he’s turned in the same direction as Edmund—their horses collide and they both fall in a screaming heap. 

For a moment, maybe, he convinced himself war could be graceful. That he could _make_ it mean something. 

Edmund is on the ground now, his guard circling—Canute’s breath is still gone, it’s only been seconds, but he casts out his hand and gives the unspoken order to engage, because Thorfinn is in the middle of it now, wrestling with the other archer in the dirt, and that’s not an acceptable loss. Canute draws his sword as Edmund tries to stand, but doesn’t make it even halfway. 

Thorfinn dispatches the man on the ground with brutal efficiency and turns on the fallen king. The crown is somewhere on the ground behind him. Thorfinn kicks away his sword before he tries to grab it, and Edmund scrambles back in the leaves and loam. 

No one comes for Canute. He’s the calm center of the chaos he started, and this is how it will always be, he realizes, as Thorfinn kneels on Edmund’s chest, forcing him down, and half-turns back to look at Canute. 

It’s almost as if he’s asking permission to do it. His dagger is already red with blood, and his eyes look as dull as the dirtied blade. 

His is a soul Canute has known for years now. Longer than any other except for his own, he realizes. All those shared moments, all the mundanity. Fingers in his hair, and sun-warmed skin against his, and Thorfinn stealing off his plate, though he has his own, and a muttered word to make him smile, almost as if by accident. The spark of humor in his eyes that’s only recently showed started to show itself.

If Thorfinn does this, if Canute lets him, then every day when he sets the crown on his head, he’ll wear this with it—Thorfinn, miserable and bloodied, the cost of his kingdom at the expense of one more shred of Thorfinn's already tattered peace. The dagger flashes red in the light that filters through the canopy. 

God, that dagger. He’ll die with it in hand, and suddenly Canute’s panic is bigger than his body.

"No!” he hears himself yell. 

His voice cracks on the word, though it still comes across as an order. Thorfinn’s head swivels toward him in full, the hand with the dagger falls absently. A wild desperation plays across Thorfinn’s eyes—and then something goes wrong. 

Blood blooms across Thorfinn’s cheek in a straight line, from his jaw to the corner of his eye.

Canute hears himself scream. Not the sound a King should make, though that only registers in the aftermath. It's over before it starts—Thorfinn whips around and catches the new assailant under the jaw with his dagger, the blade sinking in up to the hilt before the man falls away and the momentum tears it free in a spray of blood, mingling with what's already on Thorfinn's face. 

It’s the exact mirror of the nightmare he'd tried to keep at bay. He can’t breathe.

Thorfinn rises off Edmund and brings his hand to his cheek, eyes wide. Blood on his hair, red on gold. Canute is already up, already halfway to him, sword still in hand. He steps past Thorfinn but grasps his wrist in the passing, ignoring the slide of blood under his fingers as he points his gaze and his sword at Edmund.

"You surrender,” Canute says, not a demand or a question but a simple statement of fact. 

Edmund's smile is bloody. "As long as I'm alive, you won't be King. Not really." 

Another simple fact, and he's right. He's right, but the wrist clasped in his hand is shaking a little, and Thorfinn's skin is hot, and if he turns, he knows the shape of the hollow he would find in Thorfinn's eyes. The match for it would carve its place in his own chest. The sounds of the fight are coming back to him, and getting closer. This is just one more victory—they can cast some beggar's treaty and let it keep the peace for a season. Leave all the fallen bodies to the coming winter. All the gold that lay upon the ground is turned to red now, and the blood on the corpses’ faces and armor looks like nothing more than misshapen leaves—but Thorfinn is alive, and warm, and so is Canute. 

"We'll see." 

Edmund's eyes widen. If he has anything else to say, he can save it for negotiations. 

Canute turns back to Thorfinn and doesn't release his wrist but pulls the dagger out of his grip and wipes it off on his red cloak before reaching around to slide it back in its sheath. 

Thorfinn lets him do this with barely a blink, but his breath is evening back out and the tight-to-snap set of his joints is loosening moment by moment. This doesn't feel like something he can thank Thorfinn for—it's not the first time Thorfinn has saved his life and it won't be the last, and the reasoning behind it doesn't seem to mean much in the face of the result. The gut punch of relief, and equal to the gut punch of seeing Thorfinn like this, again, like a long march, looking back and realizing how far they’d come only once faced with the prospect of having to march all the way back. 

But maybe not. Thorfinn takes a breath, measured and slow, and then exhales as he shakes his head, as if clearing it. He’s close enough that the exhalation brushes Canute’s cheek. He’s still not on solid ground, but getting there. Canute squeezes his wrist once more before releasing him and steps away just as the horn sounds that means Floki’s men have finally arrived. 

Everything after moves fast.

There will be arguments and side-eyes and his advisors will wonder why Edmund is still alive, but it’s a small price to pay, Canute thinks as he finally finds an excuse to make his way to the tent where Thorfinn is being tended later. Tended, as much as he’ll let anyone _tend._ He sends out the flustered medic, a middle-aged man who looks like he’d rather treat a bear than Thorfinn, whose scowl could set tinder ablaze.

Canute takes a rag in hand and dabs the blood off Thorfinn’s face himself. Thorfinn flinches now and then, but he seems embarrassed over the wound more than anything else.

“Do you want it stitched?” Canute has no hand for it, but they can find someone who does. Without it, it’ll scar worse than the mark on Canute’s own cheek. 

Thorfinn shakes his head as Canute studies him. His clothes are less blood spattered and more blood-soaked, but his eyes are clear. Clearer than they were. Clear the way they haven’t often been. 

“Where are we going now?” Thorfinn asks. It’s unlike him to care. 

Canute leaves off with the cleaning and sits beside him on the bench. There are other tents, full of wounded, but there’s little they can do. This one is reserved for those of the court, and he wonders briefly what it means that Thorfinn was shown here first of all. 

“An island,” he replies, “to sign the treaty on neutral ground. We have to find paper to draft it on first.” This wins him a smile. Later, Thorfinn will look over the treaty and trace his fingertips over the spidery script and ask what the words mean, and Canute will wonder if, in another life, he might have been one of those casual scholars. Or maybe a farmer, if his childhood had been something other than war. 

“But you’re not—” Thorfinn must realize telling Canute he isn’t actually king now isn’t the best way of wording it, and backtracks with: “You didn’t get his crown.” The wording is almost delicately, and Canute is almost flattered that he cared enough to try.

He’s right. But there are other ways to get it—ways that don’t end in the piling of bodies, the sharp scent of blood on the air, or Thorfinn’s hands soaked in blood. The men are starting to light fires for the night, and soon there will be food, but before and after will be the burying of bodies. That never ends. It won’t, as long as he wears this crown, but he can at least be sure the lion’s share of blood is on his hands and his alone. There are easier ways of winning than wasting lives. Thorfinn would never approve if he knew, so he won’t. 

Canute reaches up and palms his cheek, thumbs at the edge of the wound to see Thorfinn flinch. This will be a reminder. One he'll look at every day. He wonders what it will remind Thorfinn of, or if he'll ever think of it at all.

“We’re done fighting,” Canute answers.

Something dangerously close to relief crosses Thorfinn’s face, but only for a moment. For once, he has no comment, no denial, no biting remark about it.

In any other life, Canute would press his mouth to the edge of his and thank him for the life he saved that day. It’s a dream he lets himself entertain only for a brief moment before he stands and steps away.

Any other life, but not this one. Maybe in another life, Thorfinn is far and gone already. So long as he can keep what he has, he tells himself that’s enough.

Winter brings more snow than they know what to do with. The court is bound up in Gainsborough for weeks on end. 

There's a restlessness to Thorfinn, all through that fall. He takes it out on Canute when the crown lets him, the training ground when Canute is too busy and the weather will allow it, on anyone who asks, and then any group. Thorkell's men join them before the season is out, and they bring with them tribute—Thorkell's word for it, though it's probably something he stole from Canute's subjects, or Eadric's, or Edmund's. Gold and furs and, curiously, a chest of books and scrolls that Canute has sent to his chambers, because those of his men that can read are few and far between and he's a more than a little concerned they'll be used for tinder if left out in the common area.

For no greater reason than Thorkell’s arrival, they stage a feast. Honeyed cakes and salted meat and root vegetables cooked tender in wine. Everyone drinks a little, or a lot, and by midnight even Thorfinn has joined them in a knife throwing contest in the main hall and is winning money for whoever will bet on him. He catches Canute's eye in the small hours, cheeks flushed under his new scar, eyes dark. It's bad form to leave the feast early but the food has been gone for hours by then, and Canute’s own drink is sitting warm in the pit of his stomach. They almost don't make it back to the room, pawing each other in the hallway, heedless of whoever might come along. It's good to be wanted, and it's starting to feel like something he can keep. Like something he's earned. 

But at dawn, Thorfinn is at the foot of his bed again, nothing but Canute's fur lined cloak over his bare shoulders, but there's no knife and stone in his hand. Instead, a paper is spread across his lap. Canute has to sit up and rub the sleep out of his eyes before he recognizes it for what it is. A map.

He stretches and yawns and tries to draw some of the tangles from his hair, though he gives it up after a moment. His skin still feels tacky with sweat. He nudges Thorfinn with his foot under the furs and fine-woven bed cloth. "Can you read that?"

Thorfinn snorts. "No. But I can tell where we are." His eyes scan the page before he finds it and then turns the paper so Canute can see it, and sure enough, he's dead on. There is London at the bottom of the page with its river running past, and then up the coast by days that are mere inches in ink, trace another inlet, and there they are.

But to pick it out without knowing any of the symbols… "You're quite clever, Thorfinn," Canute says, only a bit teasing. 

Thorfinn smiles, but not at him. He's still looking at the map, eyes roaming over it like he can see every stream and port and mountain right in front of him. An old unease rises in the back of Canute's mind. He can never quite put his finger on it, but no one brings it out in him the way Thorfinn does. 

_Come back to bed,_ he wants to say, but that's not his place, so instead he reaches out and pulls the map from Thorfinn's hands. It's beautiful, illuminated in as many colors as they have pigment to ink, drawn over with fine script and beautiful words. "Do you want to learn how to read it?" Canute offers.

Thorfinn eyes him like it might be a trick. "Why would you care?"

Canute almost sighs. Thorfinn is a fool. Instead of answering he slips from the warmth of the bed and sits beside Thorfinn and traces his finger over the letters, different than those he grew up with but no less beautiful, sounding them out as he goes. It sets Thorfinn's gaze on fire. Soon he's following along, repeating back names, asking questions about the parts of the map that aren't filled, and about what's past the margins, past where wyrms are slithering through the water and strange men blow breeze across the sea. 

"I don't know," Canute tells him. "Maybe you'll find out." 

The stretch of Thorfinn's grin is almost wide enough to break his heart.

The fighting is over, but the war is not. And what Thorfinn and Thorkell don't know can't hurt them. Thorkell he keeps plied with wine and food as the winter creeps in around the edges of their small city. Thorfinn needs only his maps and his questions answered and the freedom to go where he wants. Let him wander. Let him dream about the edge of the world. Canute dreams of the crown, and ledger books with tallies of food and men and costs that never end. He dreams of dead men, and sometimes they seek him out in dark corners and quiet halls. Askeladd's grin, and his Father's laughter—neither joyful

He has his own ways of keeping them at bay. 

The morning they hear of Edmund's death finds him in the stables, harassing Thorfinn rather than sit around the holdfast trying to look busier than a snowed in winter has him. Of course, there are infinite tasks he might see to, but none are so satisfying as bantering with Thorfinn before his ride. 

And maybe a small part of him still worries that one day, Thorfinn will ride off and decide there's no good reason to come back, and the regret Canute wasn't there to watch him go will sit with him for the rest of his days. He shutters the thought as Thorfinn talks about some or other young English soldier who ran at the sight of him in the courtyard the day before.

"I'm not that scary," Thorfinn is arguing.

Canute stifles a laugh, but enough of it lets out that Thorfinn huffs at him and turns back to the horse, like she'll be a sympathetic ear. 

It's somehow no surprise that Thorfinn has no idea how he seems. Maybe Canute should invest in making him look in a mirror now and then—and as fine as Thorfinn’s new beard is, it could do with a trim, though it's probably not worth implying that some parts of the human body don't react well to being scraped over with whiskers. Anyway, he wears them well enough.

Canute crosses his legs where he’s leaned against the stable wall. "The first time we met, do you remember? You rode in on a flaming horse. You were smaller then, and I still thought you were some demon sent to steal my soul." Or an angel, but he's not about to say that aloud, though Thorfinn did look like one, in the biblical sense—something fierce and unknowable, a creature bent on wrath.

Thorfinn curls his fingers in his horse's mane as he teases the tangles from it with a brush. "It wasn't… I didn't mean to do that. I didn't want to."

This is new. Or maybe it’s old. Maybe this is the oldest part of Thorfinn, unearthed from the black, still barely there at all, though Canute doesn’t think so. When this part of him shows, it shows deep. Of course he would feel bad about the horse.

Canute tries to moderate his smile. "You weren't impressed with me," he offers to lighten the wrinkles at Thorfinn's brow. 

It works. Thorfinn snorts, focused on a particularly tough knot, working it free as if he's worried she'll be upset if he tugs too hard. "There wasn't much to be impressed with." 

That's fair. If it stings, it's only because Canute isn't sure what it takes to impress Thorfinn now, and isn't sure he has it anyway. It's almost a certainty he doesn't. 

"I couldn't figure out how something that pretty was real. I mean, your hair—" Thorfinn darts a glance at Canute, who realizes his mouth has fallen open, and then looks back to the horse with red lighting up his ears, "—I just didn't get it. I’d never seen anything like it."

Canute had kept it long because Ragnar had let him, the way Ragnar let him spend all day in the fields or nestled in the stables when new pups were born, or took him hawking when his father would have preferred he were busy learning the sword. And maybe the hair was a defense, too. Hard to think anything that looked so much like a girl was a threat worth subduing.

Now the hair is something else, and the only one that gets away with petty names for it is Thorfinn. 

"We didn't have anything that color in Iceland,” Thorfinn goes on. “You can't grow wheat there like that. I used to imagine what fields of it would look like, because it was too—"

" _Wheat_."

Thorfinn doesn't look at him, but his hand slips with the comb and the horse turns to knicker at him in offense. "Yeah, wheat? Grows in the ground, makes—bread." He sets the comb aside with more force than necessary and gets out a rougher brush to start on the rest of her, like all of this is a normal conversation. Canute isn't sure if what's trying to bubble out of him is laughter or indignation. For the first time in years, he lets himself tug a lock of his hair over his shoulder to inspect. Thorfinn isn’t wrong. It really is the color of wheat. 

Not for the first time he wonders what Thorfinn’s childhood was like in Iceland, if _wheat_ was enough to wonder at. "What did you eat then?"

"Fish. Every day, fish." Thorfinn makes a sour face. 

Canute folds his arms over his red cloak and leans back and smiles. "Is that why you refuse to eat it now?" Only at his most desperately hungry will Thorfinn even attempt a bite of sea fish; Canute has to make sure none of the meals sent to their rooms feature anything that's even seen the ocean. He never pegged Thorfinn for a picky eater, but it’s one more piece of him that’s impossible not to wonder at.

Thorfinn pauses, as if considering. "No. They just don't make it right here.” He lets his gaze trace over Canute’s face. “Bet you could, though.”

It’s been a year or so since Thorfinn has tasted anything he’s cooked, better than a year since he had the chance. Sometimes it’s an itch under his skin—just food, so simple a thing, but to be King is to delegate, constantly. It would be nice to make something, for once, for no greater reason than someone he loves might enjoy it.

In the silence that follows, Canute lets himself trace the muscle corded up Thorfinn’s arms, the tanned skin and gold hair, and then up to Thorfinn’s face, where the new scar on his cheek is a line of pink from his jaw up. For all that Thorfinn wouldn't let them treat it to do more than clean it, the mark has healed well. It looked bad for the first month, but Canute couldn't badger him for it when he did the same with the wound on his cheek, and so they match now.

It’s on the tip of his tongue to say something. To offer something. Or maybe ask, but beyond the desire to, he isn’t sure what he would want to know. Even this spare time somewhere other than the throne is precious.

And more precious than he thought, it seems, as footsteps draw his gaze. Gunnar coming in, hands busy the way they are when he has some bit of important news he can’t wait to share.

The change in Thorfinn is instantaneous, though. His smile melts away and all his muscles tense imperceptibly; if Canute didn't know that body almost as well as his own, he wouldn't have noticed the change, but he does, and it aches. The list of people Thorfinn trusts enough to let down his guard in front of is vanishingly small. For a mad moment, Canute dreams of sending them all away, replacing every sly advisor that Thorfinn can’t stand... 

Gunnar looks between them and must read something in Canute's face because the bow he gives is deeper than necessary by inches. "I have news. Important news." He looks to Thorfinn and then to Canute, but he’s not stupid enough to imply that Thorfinn should be sent away and simply inclines his head and says in a clear voice, "King Edmund has passed."

The world shifts under Canute's feet. It feels for a moment like he's fallen, but he's still leaning where he was, and everything is right where it should be. Both Gunnar and Thorfinn are staring at him, Gunnar with what he realizes now is excitement, but only distantly, because it's Thorfinn's gaze that pulls him up short. He’s looking at Canute with open shock.

"He's dead?" Thorfinn asks, and then indignant, "From what?"

Gunnar spares him a glance. "It seems a sickness took him."

The world is still shifting under Canute’s feet, moment by moment. Edmund is dead, and if Edmund is dead, all of England is his. No one is left to challenge him, no one is left to dispute it. Edmund’s oldest son is no more than a child and sequestered far away. England is his. All of it, without question. Power tastes like something real against his tongue, something he could drink his fill of, could drown himself in—

Thorfinn's eyes don't leave Canute's face as he murmurs, "A sickness." Understanding eclipses the surprise, and something nameless and condemning is on its heels.

Gunnar looks between them again, and this time his nerves aren’t feigned. Canute takes pity on him. "Call an audience. I'll be there shortly,” he says, and watches as the man almost trips over his feet in his rush to escape. 

Thorfinn watches him go, and then turns and walks off into the stable.

He knows. Or he suspects. Edmund wasn’t so weak that a cough could claim him in a month. His wounds weren’t so desperate. But if there’s one thing the crown has taught Canute, it’s that nothing is better left to chance, and a kingdom is hardly a kingdom if it has two kings. 

Thorfinn returns, saddle in hand. The air between them is thick as smoke. "Dead. Of course he is," Thorfinn says. “That was easy.” 

The victory sours in Canute's stomach. “One death to save a thousand,” he says, though the words sound like a child’s rhyme rather than wisdom in the face of Thorfinn’s disdain.

Thorfinn doesn’t look up from the straps on the saddle as he tightens them around the horse’s girl and says softly, "I don’t think it works that way."

Canute sighs, and at the sound Thorfinn glances at him at last, his gaze sharp. “I’ve killed more people than you, princess, and I’ve never seen a corpse save anyone.” He half-shrugs and then fits his foot in the stirrup and swings up into the saddle. His horse knickers. She’s fine, spirited and young. A good match for Thorfinn, Canute thought, when he made the gift, and since he’s caught Thorfinn brushing her at odd hours, and sneaking her bits of apple on a long ride. Canute fists a hand around her halter and rubs at her cheek with one gloved hand. She knickers again, expecting some treat. He can feel Thorfinn’s gaze, but he doesn’t look. Doesn’t want to read whatever lies within his eyes. He remembers thinking those eyes were like honey, too sweet for his face. Not so anymore, with the heavy brow and the scar on his cheek and beard on his jaw.

This is the part of war Thorfinn has never cared to understand. There is strategy and sacrifice and every step is harder than the last. It’s never as simple as killing whoever is in front of you. Never as simple as revenge. Part of him wants to argue this with Thorfinn, but he's still wary. Thorfinn will always be some animal he seduced to his side with food and a warm place to sleep, ready to flee off at the first brush of trouble. 

If he asks too much, Thorfinn will leave him. The promised fight that once bound them is now a premise worn thin as spider's silk. Laughable, in retrospect.

“I don’t get it,” Thorfinn asks. “Why didn’t you just let me kill him?”

That is the question. Canute doesn't release the halter, and doesn’t answer. His fingers won't quite manage it, and his mind can’t quite wrap around it himself. In that moment in the forest, the only thing worse than not having the crown was having Thorfinn kill for it. 

He never replies, but smiles and steps aside at last. "Good hunting,” he says. “Bring back something worth eating. I’m tired of rabbit.” 

This earns him the ghost of a smile, as mournful as it is sincere. "Why? Going to cook it for me?" 

"Maybe.” In another life, he would. Even in this one, he wants to. 

Thorfinn studies him a moment longer, and then turns away and kicks the horse forward. Canute watches him go, trying to think of a reason to call him back—some excuse, a question, an apology, anything—but he has none. Only the hope that Thorfinn will return, and the faint assurance that hope hasn’t failed him yet.

They have no coronation. Not for this, not in the dead of winter. This quiet victory changed nothing, but that the English army now has no option unless they wish to follow Canute—or fight him, but as it turns out, no one wants to do much in the dead of winter. By spring, his army has tripled in size, and with Harald’s borrowed forces, it’s vaster still. 

But always, the crown demands more.

The first warm day finds them in the south and far from Mercia when the news that Eadric has passed comes. Thorfinn is there for that messenger, too, but this time he makes no fight about it. Understanding fills his gaze and when he looks at Canute after, it's the lack of surprise that cuts. Disappointing Thorfinn is becoming a way of life. 

A thousand maps and spars and easy fucks that leave them both languid and satisfied are little more than a bribe to keep Thorfinn at his side.

"I heard your brother is sick," Thorfinn says simply, as they wait out the rain one day. The rest of the men are bunked down around the fire in the hall, and their sounds filter out through the window to where Canute and Thorfinn stand outside. No need to ask where he heard it or from who—it’s been around the camp. Harald, bed-ridden, losing strength, and now the men look at Canute with a new respect. They know what this will mean.

But Thorfinn has never cared for court politics. The bigger shock is that Thorfinn knows he has a brother at all. His words aren’t an accusation, but they hit like one, because he knows: what ails Harald is his brother's ambition. 

"And how many people is that going to save?" Thorfinn asks when he doesn’t reply.

Canute's eyes widen. The edge in Thorfinn’s voice isn’t disappointment now, but something with an edge. Canute stares at him from under the hood of his cloak, open-mouthed. Thorfinn starts to turn away, but Canute grabs the back of his shirt almost without meaning to and it’s at least enough to get Thorfinn to look at him again, dusty blond hair half-hiding his scarred face. 

“Does it matter?” Canute asks desperately. It’s not within a league of what he meant to say, but it’s honest. Thorfinn never questioned Askeladd this way; how many people did Askeladd order him to kill? Did Thorfinn ever argue, he wonders? Did he try to save any of them? The question is suddenly important beyond reason, but he doesn’t ask. Doesn’t say another word. He pulls Thorfinn in instead and with the slightest sigh, Thorfinn comes back to his side.

He’s at least close enough to feel the heat off again. Closer than he was before. “I hope it’s worth it,” he murmurs. 

“It will be,” Canute says. And, without meaning to, “I can’t undo it now.” 

Thorfinn rolls his eyes. The breath Thorfinn huffs out steams the air in front of them. “I know,” he says with weight, with the heaviness of someone who’s taken more from life than they know how to carry, and this time Canute feels it like a shroud around his own shoulders. All this time, he’s tried in small ways to carry that weight with him—but now he’s adding to it. Not for the first time, and not for the last, he wonders why Thorfinn is here. He hasn’t mentioned a duel in months; hasn’t fought for longer. The men still argue for the chance to train with him, and all the rest of his days are spent hunting or exploring, running far afield and coming back for a hot meal and a warm bed. 

It’s only half a life. He’ll never revel in the fight the way Thorkell does. This isn’t the life he deserves.

That night in the quiet dark, Thorfinn pushes him back against the wall of their borrowed room and the breath against his neck becomes a mouth, biting hard. Always a little fierce. Canute embraces it; the edge of pain feels earned. He raises his hand to the back of Thorfinn’s neck, fists in his hair, and holds him close as he can, for as long as he can.

Thorfinn wears blue to his coronation, dyed so deep it nearly matches the black of Canute's cloak. Black for Harald, black for mourning, a tradition of the continent, because his usual red seems inappropriate to the occasion, for what he is now, and what he's done to get where he is. 

It isn't much of a ceremony. Enough to make it official, enough to have the weight of his title sit a little more securely about his shoulders. More an excuse for the feasting and drinking that follows, and all he need do to secure his place and the good will of his men is raise his cup to them with a nod and a smile and keep theirs full. But of course, none of it is free. It will take money to keep them content; his mind fiddles with the problem, turning it over and over as the celebration bleeds into the early hours.

Even Thorfinn drinks that night. When it’s verging on morning and still loud, Canute makes his excuses and the two of them strike out into the warm dark to find a field unoccupied by more than cows, where the only sounds are crickets and the distant revelry. A shared excuse: neither of them would have gotten sleep anywhere in the holdfast and it's hardly seemly to be out without a guard. 

At first it's quiet, and then Thorfinn points up and starts saying something about stars and measuring directions and distances—and where he picked that up is anyone's guess, but his voice as he speaks is warmer than the hall was by far.

He's shaved and cut his hair, too, and it can't be for the occasion, because Canute’s crown isn't worth that to him, but it still feels like a gift. Canute watches him watch the stars in the dark and wants to run his fingertips over his smooth jaw and now-old scar, maybe taste it. 

But all these wants are still one-sided and still forbidden. What they share isn’t so tender. It isn’t a young man’s infatuation. He lets himself watch and imagine, and no more.

With the crown of England and Denmark on his head, there are new whispers. His advisors talk of the Northern queens they wish for him to marry, and queens of lands Canute has never seen. Aethelred's widow is a fine woman, they say. Beautiful, with sons already, and she's acknowledged his kingship, made the right overtures. A smart woman, then, too.

“You would make a good match for her,” Floki whispers in his ear as they look over her fine scripting. Maybe she penned it herself. Canute thinks of heirs and legacy, and of freeing Thorfinn at last from what lies between them, and of the dark-haired head that sometimes grins at him from corners in these moments. He looks between all of his assembled advisors and then thinks of the weight of Thorfinn's gaze across the hall during the bare ceremony the day before and the weight of the arm he woke beneath that morning, and wants to laugh.

Nothing he has done so far has been according to anyone’s will but his own. He’s King, and he answers to no one—not even God. He’s given the crown much, but not this. “No,” he says simply, all the weight of his cape and crown cast about him,” but we are sorry for her loss.”

He isn’t. Not really. Not in the way that counts. He already has what she's lost, and he won't be so careless with it.

Later, it seems like a bad prophecy. Like inevitability. 

The issue is this: his kingdom is vast, and his enemies are everywhere. His father told him once, not a warning so much as a promise that the crown was what would command his armies, but he’d failed to mention that the crown would command him, in turn. Giving up his army is giving up power. It’s not an option. He could make more war, raise taxes on new conquers to save the ones before, pay off one group with the takings from another, an unending cycle of gaining and gaining, bloating his kingdom until it started to rot from the inside the way his father seemed to before the end—but then they receive a messenger. A simple farmer from a not-so-simple farm, and with him he’d brought tribute enough for a feast.

It all becomes clear. It all becomes easy. If he needs something for his army, nothing is keeping him from taking it. Gunnar agrees, and Floki salivates at the mouth, and the men that were Harald’s at least keep their silence on it. There is no authority to oppose his anymore.

None, except Thorfinn’s.

Letting him stay in the council chamber was a mistake, Canute realizes. A roll of Thorfinn’s eyes or an under-his-breath comment are one thing—arguing with the King outright is another. And everyone is watching as Thorfinn’s confusion moves from innocent to livid, and their conversation is no longer an aside that the rest of the chamber can pretend not to notice. 

They’re standing—Thorfinn is always at his side these days, but it means there’s no space, no distance he can gain to make Thorfinn’s anger bite less. “You have all of England. You have Denmark. You have _everything_. Why do you need a—a stupid farm?” But it’s not about need. None of this is needed. That’s the point.

Canute steps back from the table, motioning to the door— “We can discuss this later,” he says, but Thorfinn ignores him and follows, stepping in to fill the space he’s left even as Canute tries to turn away. 

“I thought you were cautious, I thought you didn’t want people to die in a pointless war.” 

He did. He still does, and this is the best of bad options. There are no easy choices under the crown; Thorfinn simply doesn’t understand that. Maybe he never will. Canute’s hurt makes him angry in turn, and he murmurs with barely controlled anger, “Askeladd died so I could have this."

It’s the wrong thing to say. 

Thorfinn's eyes go wide and his hard jaw softens for a moment before it all goes to hell. Without a more than a sound of pure rage, he shoves Canute back against the wall, and buries his dagger into the wood beside Canute's head. Canute didn’t even see him draw it. "Don't you dare say his name."

Canute knows that look, or thought he did. Raw anger. But not so raw now. This is tempered. This is that old disappointment, and it aches.

"He didn’t die for this," Thorfinn whispers, his voice rough as stone, his words ghosting over the space between them, maybe too soft for the rest of the room to hear. "He wouldn’t have wanted you to become this _thing_ —"

Canute doesn't let himself flinch, but puts both hands on the center of Thorfinn's chest and pushes him back, hard. They're of a similar strength, but Canute will always have height over him. Now he uses it to stare off at the men behind Thorfinn, all of them gape-mouthed. 

"Thorfinn, get out." 

No betrayal this time in Thorfinn’s eyes.

Thorfinn grunts and tears his dagger from the wall, and then he's gone out the door without a word or a glance.

Canute doesn't let himself think on Thorfinn again that day. Not about his fly-away gold hair, not about the proud span of his shoulders as he walked away, not about the draw of his fingers over the back of Canute's neck that morning before dawn, before their fight. None of it. Not for a moment. Not for a breath.

For two days, Thorfinn barely speaks to him. The boats are readied and loaded, all the men assigned. A hundred should be enough for this trifle of a farm. All Canute needs to do is back them into a fight. Floki's men will take care of the rest, and then his empire will be secured for another winter. One farm, another. Steal to pay one army, use the army to gain another. It is a perfect succession, a path without end. He has so much, but he will have more. If there’s another way, he doesn’t know it.

On the day they sail out, Thorfinn is there. He boards silently. At the bow, he looks out across the sea, cloak flapping about his shoulders, conviction written on every line of his face, more the Viking than Canute will ever be. 

They put in at what barely qualifies as a bay, no more than a spit of rock and a forest with a clear stream flowing through it and out to the sea. Enough space to make camp and enough water for a bath. The men make camp while Canute washes out his hair in the stream and shaves by the evening light bouncing off the water, the scene unaccountably calm for what’s to come. Despite his silence, Thorfinn sits nearby, watching him now and then, between whatever he's doing with his arrows. Not for the first time, Canute finds himself imagining that other life, a one room cabin instead of a castle, rabbit stew instead of feast, and the only gold for miles as the spread of hair on the pillow beside him at night. 

Simple. And foolish. His throat tightens. 

Thorfinn has yet to speak to him. All overtures have been met with a mix of single syllables, frustration, or worst of all, resignation. He supposes he should be glad Thorfinn didn't fight him all day on the boat, too. Instead he stood on the prow and looked like he was a part of the ship, as if he belonged there with it, had sprung into existence when the last board was bent and hammered into place, and it had done nothing but make the unease in Canute's gut churn.

When Canute is finished, he inspects his face in the calm pool of water as the stream babbles by. He doesn't look like a boy anymore—or a girl, for that matter. Thorfinn was right; he's grown into the hair at last, and into the long-lashed eyes, but he can't decide if he looks like a King or something else entirely. The cloak he wore for Harald’s mourning is now the one he favors, black on black. It washes out his color, turns his eyes to chips of ice and his hair from wheat to snow. 

The padding of boots on grass behind him breaks the perfect silence. "Ready to talk?" Canute asks. The cadence of Thorfinn’s steps is familiar as his own heartbeat.

“Duel me."

That's Thorfinn's answer. All of Canute’s carefully banked frustration comes roaring back, the heat of it making his chest burn.

“I don’t want to spar.” Not after a day of sailing. Not if it’s some excuse for Thorfinn to beat out his anger, or, more likely, to sate himself and work out his frustrations in pleasure without admitting that's what's he's doing. He can run his fingers through Canute's hair in the dark, can press his mouth to a bared throat, can fall asleep with their limbs tangled and let the press of a body soothe away his nightmares, but he won't admit to the wanting. In the light of day, he's still the wolf and utterly his own. 

Canute never expected to get a lover out of this, but at least a companion. He stands and fetches the crown from where it’s sat on the moss beside the creek and settles it back on his damp hair without looking at Thorfinn. He can feel the presence behind him now, a foot away, if that. His proximity makes Canute's blood leap, and then it jumps again when Thorfinn lowers his voice and says, "No, a real duel. You owe me.”

That's not worth answering. Canute feels desperation beginning to steal in, freezing his blood in his veins, frost under the door. He's held this off for years; just a little longer, and it will be enough. For what, he's not sure, but his heart beats with _not yet, not today._

"Don't be an idiot," Canute murmurs, because he has to say something, and sweeps by him, back toward the sounds of camp, not pausing to listen for Thorfinn's steps behind him. He’ll follow. He always does. Thorfinn was his first follower, he realizes, ordered to protect Canute before they even knew the color of each other's eyes. 

At the edge of camp, Thorfinn catches up to him and grabs his arm through the heavy cloak. Canute rips it away. " _Thorfinn—_ "

"If you'd just listen to me," Thorfinn isn't even a step behind him. The sight they must make. 

Canute doesn’t stop, and he doesn’t listen. His tent is set up at the far side of camp, closest to the beach. He goes as fast as he can without it looking like he's running from the man who’s ostensibly chief of his guard, though even the thought makes Canute want to laugh. His attempt to look dignified doesn’t work, and even Floki’s hardened Jomsvikings like a little good gossip. They watch with open curiosity that would be comical if it was happening to anyone else. At least Thorkell isn't there. Canute sends a prayer of wry thanks to whichever god decided that, but it's hardly a balm. Tent walls are no better than paper, and this will be a fight—a real fight. The men will be falling over themselves to be the first to give Thorkell the blow by blow when they return, no matter how it ends.

Floki shoots them a look as they pass, interest not banked by his faux-concern. He’s always hated Thorfinn more than the rest, and that's one more mess that will need cleaning up later. Canute pushes through the flaps of the tent as Thorfinn grabs for him again.

"You're so very fucking stubborn," he's saying. Bold words, but then, they always are from him. It wouldn't be half as annoying if Thorfinn couldn't back most of them up with action and conviction and real skill.

"And you're one to talk,” Canute bites back as he turns at last in the relative privacy of the tent. "I am not _dueling_ you. And since when have you cared how I rule?" The words trip over themselves in the rush out of his mouth. "Are you going to start advising me on taxes now, as well? As long as you get your shot at me, you don't care. You've never cared."

He tries to keep it a whisper, but by the end he’s almost shouting, the words finding their own life as they come out, tapping into some secret well of anticipated grief.

Thorfinn reels back like he's been slapped. For a few long breaths that Canute makes himself take, one after the other, Thorfinn says nothing. 

"I care," he says at last. 

Canute waits for him to elaborate, but he doesn't, and now Canute feels like a fool twice over for thinking he could pretend to himself they were talking about anything so banal as a farm. He can feel his face going bloodless. Everything is so simple for Thorfinn, every decision a straight line, a question to act or to not act, while Canute weighs loyalties and petty squabbles and not least of all money. 

A deep breath. Another. And then the last hope that this conversation will die a natural death fades as Thorfinn makes a sound between a groan and a growl, his default when words fail him, though it’s been the better half of a year since Canute has been treated to this particular brand of Thorfinn’s rage. He’d been getting better, Canute thought. Foolish. 

He doesn’t look at Thorfinn, but bows his head and feels his hair slip over his shoulders where it’s not held back by the crown. “I have a standing army that will need to be fed for a full winter. I can tax all the English until they can’t afford a loaf of bread, or I can release the men and have an unpaid army roaming across the countryside looking for work and a meal—or willing to take it. You lived with Askel—with a band of mercenaries. How do you think that would go?” He’s breathing hard now. He makes his voice lower and finishes, “Or, I can do this. Those are my choices, Thorfinn.”

Thorfinn raises his hand, like he might—what? Grab Canute again, or touch his hair—before he lowers it. 

“You keep saying that,” he says. Canute can’t look at him. It’s been so long since Thorfinn truly hated him. “You keep acting like killing is going to save people. Don’t lie to yourself, at least, princ—”

 _Princess._ He’s the last one that uses it, and only ever with strange affection. Now, it sounds like the insult it once was. Like they’ve somehow lost every moment between this and when they first met, and he was nothing in Thorfinn’s eyes but an inconvenience and a fool.

Canute pulls himself up. “I’m King now. And Askeladd isn’t here anymore.” He says Askeladd’s name with conviction, because that figure still sits between them like a specter and because the full-body flinch Thorfinn gives in return is the only victory he's had all day even if it cuts him, too. “I have to make these decisions on my own.” _And so do you_ , he doesn’t say. At some point, Thorfinn will have to act without the excuse of revenge. He’ll have to decide who to follow and why—or no one at all. He'll have to want something for the sake of wanting it.

The thought costs Canute something, because nowhere in that does he see himself. He’d thought it enough if the blood was kept off Thorfinn’s hands, but the stain will spread to him eventually, so long as they share this life. Even the thought of Thorfinn following the crown is laughable, but that's all Canute has to offer him. That's all he is now. All the rest of his words rise and die in his throat; he can’t breathe around them.

“Yeah, you’re right. You _are_ the King. That means you can do whatever you want. What was it you kept talking about—a paradise? This is your paradise?" 

He says the word like it's a joke, and not a good one. 

“What do you want me to do? I can’t. I can’t just leave.” Canute chokes on a laugh. “What would my men say?”

“You’re smart. You’d think of something.” As if it’s that easy.

That was the first compliment Thorfinn ever paid him. _Not bad for an excuse,_ and Canute had stood and pointed at him and yelled with all the indignation of the naive that no one had ever spoken to him like that, because no one had. No one has, even to this day. No one else would dare. Silence reigns; for a summer night, it’s unaccountably cold. Words won’t come to him. He always says the wrong ones with Thorfinn, always finds the worst thing to say, always gets that same look thrown back at him. His mouth works until he grits his teeth and decides if he can’t find the right words, he’ll say nothing.

Thorfinn is immovable, still watching, still waiting, and then he says softly, with conviction, “A true warrior doesn’t need a sword.” 

The mad optimism of the phrase should sound child-like, but it doesn’t. The certainty is so foreign on his face, and so beautiful. His eyes flash with ruddy sunset-light that’s filtering through the canvas of the tent. 

Foolish of Canute to think he could stand here and say nothing, in the face of that. "But I'm not a warrior. Remember? Neither of us are. That's what you said." 

He bites out the words because he's the King, and he owns oceans and cities and all the land he’s ever set foot on, but to fall short in the eyes of this one person makes him feel like a pauper. 

Thorfinn's eyes go wide and—there it is, one last time, that look he's promised himself for years he would never see on that face again. He wants to tear the crown off and throw it on the ground for all the good it’s done him.

At least he manages to wait until Thorfinn walks out before he does.

After, he sits and scrapes his fingers through his long hair, and then pushes the heels of his palms to his eyes until colors dance behind his eyes and the stinging at their corners stops.

In the morning, Thorfinn is gone.

He wakes to a cold bed roll, and the crown still lying on the ground, mocking him. When he tries to put it on, it doesn't fit right. Hair keeps falling forward into his face, and he realizes his bangs are askew—someone has shorn a wide lock of his hair off where it was longest, and not worth guessing who. Thorfinn’s pack and cloak and bow are gone with him, and this is what he took of Canute’s. 

For a mad moment, he wants to grab his sword from its sheath and shear off the rest and leave it right there, a puddle of gold for Thorfinn to find when he comes back. If he comes back. 

But he doesn’t. 

By mid-morning, the mist has burnt off the sea, and Canute loses even that excuse to keep them from the boats. No one mentions Thorfinn’s absence. It’s half blessing, and half confirmation that nothing said in the tent last night was private. He sets himself up in the cabin on the deck with his books and scrolls and infinite ledgers and tries to make it all make sense the way Thorfinn would have seen it. Maybe if Thorfinn could read and do his sums, he would have found some perfect answer to this—but he’s gone. Canute kills the thought, mind spinning with the cost of this, the cost of that. It all comes down to the one thing he can’t let go of: power. His army is his power, his right to rule; the crown demands it.

It’s late when they anchor just beyond the beach that’s their destination. The men make camp while he stays on the boat with his papers and regrets and thousand inadequacies, spiting the bedroll that will still smell too much like Thorfinn. 

They wake him in the morning, and he feels light headed with it all. Sore from the night spent in a chair, sore from self-pity. His mind keeps worrying at the space Thorfinn occupied like it’s a wound that keeps tearing itself open. In the light of day, all the numbers on the pages have run together and the thought of having to make a small war over them makes him feel he’s aged years in a night. The point Thorfinn didn’t bring up but should have is that it wouldn’t stop with this one farm—it would take more. Always, more, and the thought is suddenly exhausting. Without anyone to weather it with him, infinitely more so. 

_You_ are _the king. That means you can do whatever you want._

A manic grin splits his face, almost painful, and not sure if he’s about to burst out laughing or weep. Thorfinn was right: he can do whatever he wants, and he doesn’t want to fight a war today, heart-sick and sorry. 

The knock on his door comes again and he schools his expression back to neutral, refits the crown on his head, ignoring the fly-away lock of hair that refuses to stay down now, and opens it at last.

The dawn light is blinding. 

Later, standing on the beach, staring down an army of half-armed farmers and slaves and their few mercenaries, it all seems small. He wonders, not for the first time or the last, what Askeladd would have done and said, and then lets himself smile at the assembled men, trying to shape the grin Askeladd would have worn for such an occasion. 

“I’m here to commend you. This farm is to be praised,” he says. 

It’s worth it for the titter of surprise and the particular shade of red that casts across Floki’s face. His only regret is that Thorfinn isn’t there to see it.

He’s right about Thorkell. They have a feast when Canute returns to Jelling, make a meal of what he brought back with him, and it’s considered by all to be a boon and clever bit of diplomacy. He bears every compliment and praise from his men though each one feels like a small humiliation. The feeling is solidified when Thorkell offers him a horn of ale halfway through the night with sympathy and humor playing behind his eyes. 

Canute breathes deep and then shakes his head. If he starts drinking over this, he’ll never stop. 

Thorkell only sighs at him, as if he’s the one being unreasonable. “He’ll be back,” Thorkell says, consoling.

“No, he won’t.” Canute makes himself pick a bite of buttered bread off the plate, and chew, and swallow, while Thorkell looks on, surprise in his eyes. 

“I forget how young you two are,” he mutters and takes another deep drink before he wipes his mouth and smiles wryly. “When Thors left I cried for weeks.”

Canute starts. “But you two weren’t—”

He laughs. “No! No, nothing like that. But he was my friend, and I loved him.”

 _Friend._

The words is like a bell inside his head, and Canute realizes: that’s why this aches twice over. 

This isn’t a distant, selfish love anymore. He told himself it was a boy’s passion, but it was more—it was trust and quiet asides and riding together with the sun on their backs, silent conversations, quiet mornings, shared meals and knowing what Thorfinn thought without having to hear it said. 

It was losing all of that. Losing the one person who cared enough to argue with him when he was being a fool, the one person who could look at his crown and see nothing but the man beneath it. Losing all of that, because now he isn't sure if he ever had it to begin with, or if it was all in his head. 

Either way, the loss threatens to choke him. He’s so tired of being this weak.

It must show on his face, because Thorkell mutters, “Oh dear, oh dear,” mock-soft, and pats his back like he’s a child or a particularly sad animal and the repetition will sooth him—a King. It’s such a shock that someone aside from Thorfinn would dare to touch him at all that it shakes him out of the brief spiral. 

“You didn’t hear him,” Canute explains. “You didn’t see him. I’ve never seen his eyes like that. He’s not coming back.” He breathes around the weight in his chest because he has to. “He told me a real warrior doesn’t carry a sword. What does that mean?”

Thorkell studies him from under his heavy brows. The crows feet at the corners wrinkle. “I don’t know.”

“I think… I want to know.” The crown hasn’t fit on his head since the night Thorfinn left and even now it seems like nothing—like cold weight and gold and nothing else. He still commands his armies, he still owns the seas, and even if he didn’t—

That thought is taboo. A cabin, a shared meal, or Thorfinn at the prow of a ship. A thousand other lives they might lead, together or apart.

“If you figure it out, let me know,” Thorkell says.

He holds out the alehorn once more. This time, Canute takes it. 

It’s two weeks to the day since Thorfinn left, and Canute is learning to live with the loss of a part of him he didn’t know how to guard. It’s two weeks to the day, and he’s made plans to disband all but his navy, and some of that as well, with the Jomsvikings in reserve and paid what tribute taxes can bring in exchange for the service. It’s two weeks to the day, and he’s learning to be clever, and he thinks if he had Thorfinn again, he might know how to keep him. 

In their rooms he hoards a small pile of the books and scrolls that might have interested Thorfinn—a bestiary illustrated with strange animals, a map of the East, histories of places neither of them have been. 

It’s two weeks to the day when he wakes and finds a familiar figure at the foot of his bed, book in hand. 

He steps into the room, sees Thorfinn’s outline limned in candlelight, and thinks at once he’s gone mad at last. Seeing his father, seeing Askeladd—seeing the dead is an old right he’s earned and will atone for until he joins them. But if all the long years stretch ahead of him with this ghost to haunt him, too—

"You left me," Thorfinn says. He's not smiling, but then, he almost never does. 

They aren't the words Canute was expecting, from a ghost or from the man himself. The book snaps shut, and Thorfinn sets it aside as he steps toward Canute like he’s stalking prey. “I could hardly believe it,” he says deadly-soft. It feels like his words in Thorfinn's mouth. _No, you left me._ But something like real offense is playing across Thorfinn's face, almost like that look that shattered it all in the beginning, like betrayal. "You shithead,” Thorfinn growls, “you actually _left me there_. In the middle of fuck all Denmark! Do you know how long it took to find a boat back? I had to trade my bow." Thorfinn stops a step away. Canute tempers the instinct to run, or to sweep him up in a hug, or worse—to kiss him on the mouth the way husbands and wives and lovers do. 

"I didn't think you were coming back," Canute murmurs. 

His body aches with old wounds healed over years ago. Even his cheek seems to sting. Part of him still can’t trust believe is there at all; his mind has painted him too many beautiful, bitter images of Thorfinn's new life off on some adventure. If he is back, it's not for long, and if he leaves again, when he leaves again, Canute will cut his hair and grow that beard and forget he ever had this. It will kill him if he doesn’t.

Thorfinn sighs and rolls his eyes, as if looking for Canute’s point, before settling back on Canute with skepticism and something warm. “I saw the farm.”

“And how was it?” Canute breathes.

“Quiet. I got a meal.”

“Good,” Canute says, and finds he means it, and that the prospect of Thorfinn getting a warm meal at anyone’s table is a beautiful thought. In this moment, if Thorfinn asked him to cook an entire warren of rabbits, he would do it, and banish everyone else from the kitchens until it was done. Dine on it for a week. Do nothing but eat and sleep and—

“Why didn’t you kill them?”

Canute musters the shadow of a laugh. "Hard to make a paradise out of corpses,” he says wryly. 

Thorfinn stares at him, unwavering; it’s impossible to tell if this answer is acceptable to him, but maybe it doesn’t matter, because the next words out of his mouth are, “Duel me.”

It’s barely past dawn. Soon the entire holdfast will be up and busy. Even if war isn’t imminent, life is still busy. How many times has Thorfinn said this, he wonders. Norway and Sweden have seen his threat and now that his army is more than disbanded, they smell blood in the water between their countries. It won’t be long before the boats are readied for a real war, no matter how he works to oppose it, but he finds suddenly that the prospect of the endless fight is too much when faced alone. All the long years of this with no one to know him, but maybe some succession of queens and heirs and vassals, all with their own agenda.

“Fine,” he hears himself say. 

Like a ghost walking through the world of men he rises from bed and ties his hair back, pulls on a loose tunic and pants, and grabs his sword from its rest against the wall—Thorfinn watching him all the while. He falls into step behind Canute as they make their way out of the building. Most of the men are already up.

Thorkell is sitting outside the main hall and stares at them as they pass before he waves and yells, “Good luck! I won’t bet on either of you fools!” 

Canute turns back and catches his single eye—the hand he’s waving with is the one missing fingertips—and has to swallow down the breakfast he hasn’t eaten. Surely Thorfinn won’t mutilate him. He’s efficient, not cruel. That’s some mercy, he tells himself, as they make their way out of the holdfast and past the shocked-silent guards on watch, out to the fields they once spent the night lying out in. 

The morning smells fresh. There’s dew on the grass so they find a copse of trees and a clearing beyond, all summer-sweet. 

If there were a way to put it off for all eternity, he would, but he’s tired from running. They stand a few yards apart, the way they have countless times for this same purpose. Canute raises his blade weakly before he takes a breath and settles his nerves and tells himself this one will count; best give it all he has. 

In the next breath, Thorfinn is gone.

Canute realizes his mistake a half second from too late and spins in time to block the strike that Thorfinn makes at his neck. Fast; he’s always been fast. How many times has he marveled at it? And he realizes as he dodges another strike and then barely has his blade shifted in time to block the next as Thorfinn drops the dagger from one hand to the other that in all their spars, he’s never meant it. He’s never really tried. Thorfinn has toyed with him for years if this is how fast he is, and this is a fight. A real fight. He means to do it. Canute may be a fighter now, and a good one thanks to his training—but Thorfinn is better. Thorfinn ferocity distilled, the way no one else is, pure killing intent.

It falls together; the reason he didn’t want to fight anymore was this. What joy can be found in a fight when it’s always been to the death—when every fight was life or death, kill or be killed.

With Askeladd, he was too angry to focus on the strategy. Not now. His capacity to anger Thorfinn has been exhausted; Canute is outclassed in every way, and he flatters himself with the thought that this particular Thorfinn could have beat Askeladd on a whim. Askeladd would be proud. 

Canute falls back a step, and another, and Thorfinn is already in his space. The block he manages deflects the blow aiming for his neck, but the sound of it, the _speed_ of it, vibrates up his arm and in his ears. Already, Thorfinn is moving again, sweeping around him, coming in low. Canute kicks on instinct. It connects with the side of Thorfinn’s knee, but he’s miscalculated. 

Thorfinn skids as he stops and grabs Canute’s leg, and god, he’s strong. Canute’s balance fails him, fatally. He’s thrown back into the dirt so hard his vision goes white and his tongue turns to lead in his mouth. 

_Up, get up,_ he screams at himself. At least make it a good fight. At least make Thorfinn work for this kill.

He opens his eyes and tries to blink away the black floating in them as he struggles in the dirt, but it’s too late. Thorfinn is staring down at him, dagger in hand, dead still. 

They’ve been here before, a hundred times, and never has he looked like this. This is what a warrior looks like, Canute thinks distantly. In his mind, he’d always planned to win this fight, somehow; to find some cunning way through Thorfinn’s defenses and end this without bloodshed. A dream, he realizes, and a foolish one. With Thorfinn, he’s always the fool. 

His attempt to push himself up is pathetic; Thorfinn kicks him back lightly, and then settles his foot at the center of Canute’s chest, holding him pinned to the ground with enough weight to force the air out of his lungs.

The sun shafting through the trees dances across his hair and shoulders. The dagger glints as it falls, a blink of light that blinds him for that last moment—

Canute hears the blade hit more than feels it, a dull thud in his ears, but then he takes a breath, and another, and the pain doesn’t come. He rolls his head to the side and there’s the blade, buried to the hilt in the leaves. He has to rise a hand to his neck to convince himself it’s not bloody, but there isn’t a scratch on him.

Red on something pale catches his eye and then he notices what’s odd about the dagger he’s seen a thousand times. The hilt is wrapped in cloth and spun gold the shade a match for the hair that’s splayed around Canute now that it’s come free from its tie. The lock of hair Thorfinn took from him, and—it’s a scrap of cloth from his old red cloak, he realizes, wondering when Thorfinn had the chance to take it.

Thorfinn’s foot rises and then he kneels over Canute and resettles, sitting on his quarry like Canute is a particularly fine pillow and it’s been a long day and. For him, maybe it has. Maybe it's been a long life. His face is cast in shadow, hair hanging in front of his face, obscuring his eyes. A silence holds the clearing, like ice at the edge of winter, ready to break.

"Do you know what a true warrior is?" Thorfinn asks.

No. But maybe he's beginning to understand. Maybe he knows one—just one. Canute shakes his head, a bare shift against the dirt. 

"I don't know either," Thorfinn continues. His hands grip at Canute’s soft-spun shirt. "I thought I would know by now. I thought it would be easy—"

His voice cuts off. Something wet hits Canute's neck and slides away. Another follows, and then Thorfinn gasps for air, low and ragged, like he's taken himself by surprise with this and can't stop it now it's started. The hands on Canute's chest tighten to fists. He makes a pained sound, ugly and animal, and it’s been so long since he was this. Canute realizes he’s matching the body on top of his breath for breath, like part of him is lodged somewhere in Thorfinn, bound to his sorrows and aches. 

When his last bit of resolve gives way, it doesn’t feel like a breaking, but like something falling into place at long last. He pushes himself up and cups Thorfinn's face in one hand. There’s stubble on his cheeks, broken by the scar that splits his face. Did he rest before he got to Jelling? Or did he walk all the way through. A quick tally of distance and time, and two weeks to make it back doesn’t seem much at all. Canute will have to feed him double rations for a week, keep him in bed an hour past dawn at least. 

He leans in and kisses Thorfinn. It's easy. It's the simplest thing he's ever done, the press of his mouth to cold lips, and the surprised intake of breath against his cheek, and the slip of hair through his fingers.

When he pulls back, Thorfinn is staring at him in shock. Maybe this is it, and this will be the thing that drives him away at last for good, but he’s not crying anymore. That’s something. Maybe the only thing he’s done right for Thorfinn in a long time.

That thought settles, and resignation with it as he lets himself study Thorfinn's face. 

He looks a bit like Thors as Canute imagined him once, draped in glory and confidence. But he looks a bit like Askeladd, too, with the promise of wrinkles one day at the corner of his sharp eyes, a mouth made for smiling. Canute memorizes it—every line, every shade of his gaze, and is glad for the chance because in the next moment Thorfinn is moving, and then he’s too close to see. 

His kiss is less careful. He bites, and his stubble scratches, and this is the way Thorfinn has always been: inescapable, but Canute finds he wouldn’t mind if this swallowed him whole. He lets it, for that moment. 

After a breath, Thorfinn pulls away. “I won,” he says. 

“Of course, you did.” It was never in question, no matter how foolish his dreams otherwise. It's only, he hadn't quite thought this was what Thorfinn winning would look like.

The lost look that haunted Thorfinn’s face is gone. He hadn’t noticed in the chill of the morning, but now the comparison is easy. He's grown at last, in full, and this Thorfinn is one Canute flatters himself even Thors would be honored by, and he has room to become greater still.

Thorfinn sits back and stands and holds out his hand. Canute lets himself be pulled to his feet, though he stumbles once he’s there, and it’s only Thorfinn’s grip that keeps him from falling back on his ass once again.

For a moment they stand like that, as Canute tries to decide what to do with himself now that all the loss and regret have been set on fire and burned out to make way for something better. They’re burning still in the pit of his stomach, making him giddy. The dark spaces under Thorfinn's eyes are still wet, though the tears were brief and few and the kind that come from the deep frustration that's familiar. Little is harder than not knowing how to be what you feel you should have been from the start. Canute reaches out to brush underneath one and wipe it away, but Thorfinn swats at his hand weakly before it can connect and wipes his face in his sleeve, which isn't clean enough for that. 

None of him is, actually.

Canute sniffs. "You need a bath." 

"Oh." Thorfinn looks down at himself as if seeing his mud splattered travel leathers for the first time, and then pulls up his half-cloak to smell it, and his eyes go wide. “I could eat a horse, I think.” 

“Don’t. She’s missed you.” And if Canute spent a few sorry hours in the stables, commiserating with Thorfinn’s horse for their mutual loss, no one need know. 

Thorfinn starts off toward the edge of the field where the sun has risen in full and burned off the mist, but Canute can’t let him go so easy. "You know… there will still be battles. I can't avoid them all." Not for either of their sakes.

But Thorfinn only looks at him with clear eyes and says, "I know. Someone has to make sure you don't get yourself killed."

Relief dislodges the stone that tried to settle in Canute’s stomach; if there are fights to come, at least he won't fight them alone. 

He catches up to Thorfinn in a few strides. "I'm not that unskilled, you know.” 

"No, not at all." Thorfinn reaches out and brushes some of the dirt off his behind for him in a move that's too shocking to process in the moment but registers after as belated indignation. "I had a long time to think. If you want a farm so bad, why don't you just go build one? You still have ships, right?”

It's not that simple, Canute starts to think—but then, maybe it is. Maybe he can make it so. Maybe the crown is good for more than war, and maybe there's some place on Thorfinn's maps—or better, some place not—where they can do whatever they like, if this life threatens to break them again.

"We don't need to go back yet," Canute offers when they crest a rise and see Jelling ahead, already bustling, smoke rising here and there. 

"I'm sure you have an important audience to sit through.” Thorfinn is right, but not with that tone. "And I'd like to see the look on Floki's face."

Canute opens his mouth to remind Thorfinn that Floki is a commander and worthy of at least pretended respect, but what comes out instead is, "You should have seen him at Kettil's farm. I thought Wulf might have to carry him back to the ship he was so mad."

Thorfinn's face lights up.

They waste the whole walk back meandering through the fields as he trades the story of the beach for a story of the slaves Thorfinn met at the farm, and then how he bartered for passage home, though when he uses the word home his eyes are not on Jelling.

Canute thinks, this is what love looks like, after all, in all its selfish want and small sacrifices and great joys. It was beside him all along.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [[fic on twitter](https://twitter.com/arahir/status/1229487924346884097)]
> 
> Thank you so much for reading. I don't usually leaven an author's note, but for this I wanted to, so bear with me!
> 
> I had a couple of reasons for writing this. The first is that we're never shown Thorfinn's development immediately after Askeladd's death, even though its pivotal to his character. I wanted to show it, and just as much, I wanted to show the way Thorfinn and Canute's positions are flipped by the end of that second arc: they stay foils to each other but become so different from who they were. How did Thorfinn decide he didn't want to fight anymore, when before it was so mechanical and second-nature? What would that even look like? How did Canute go from believing pointless fighting was the highest evil to killing his own brother for the throne? And most of all: if their development still ended up hinging on one another in a single scene, what would it look like to see it happen over time?
> 
> That was what I wanted to explore. I don't know if I answered any of those questions, but I am glad I got the chance to write this and it's been an absolute joy! I don't promise I could do better, but I know I can do worse, and for these two I'd certainly try 😂


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